Mapping CAN-to-ethernet communication channels within virtualized embedded environments

Intelligent driver assistance systems and new infotainment innovations cause a rapidly growing demand of computing power. To satisfy that demand, the quantity of electronic control units in cars has increased dramatically. OEMs tackle that trend by consolidating software on powerful multicore hardware platforms. However, current software solutions are mostly static and designed to run on limited platforms. As promising operating system for automotive, Linux comes into consideration, which seems to scale better than already existing solutions. To ease the migration process of older software parts and guarantee freedom from interference according to ISO26262 between single software partitions, embedded hypervisors can achieve that requirements. Up to now, automotive systems are not developed to run within virtualized environments. Within this paper, we present an approach to map communication channels of virtual automotive ECUs and connect them with their already existing CAN interfaces. For our analysis, we use the Xen hypervisor. The focus for interaction between virtual machines is to use SocketCAN and given paravirtualized Ethernet drivers. Our goal is a non-intrusive software integration methodology. We keep the source code within software partitions as unmodified as possible. To benchmark our studies, we evaluate our implementation on the Intel i7 and the.