RT-CASEs: Container-Based Virtualization for Temporally Separated Mixed-Criticality Task Sets

This paper presents the notion of real-time containers, or rt-cases, conceived as the convergence of container-based virtualization technologies, such as Docker, and hard real-time operating systems. The idea is to allow critical containers, characterized by stringent timeliness and reliability requirements, to cohabit with traditional non real-time containers on the same hardware. The approach allows to keep the advantages of real-time virtualization, largely adopted in the industry, while reducing its inherent scalability limitation when to be applied to large-scale mixed-criticality systems or severely constrained hardware environments. The paper provides a reference architecture scheme for implementing the real-time container concept on top of a Linux kernel patched with a hard real-time co-kernel, and it discusses a possible solution, based on execution time monitoring, to achieve temporal separation of fixed-priority hard real-time periodic tasks running within containers with different criticality levels. The solution has been implemented using Docker over a Linux kernel patched with RTAI. Experimental results on real machinery show how the implemented solution is able to achieve temporal separation on a variety of random task sets, despite the presence of faulty tasks within a container that systematically exceed their worst case execution time. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Software and its engineering → Real-time systems software