Predictable inter-domain communication in a real-time hypervisor: design, implementation, and application

System virtualization is gaining great interest in the cyber-physical embedded domain because it provides temporal isolation between different systems running on the same physical platform, while allowing them to exchanging data at the hypervisor level. In safety-critical systems with real-time requirements, specific inter-domain communication mechanisms need to be designed to provide predictable, secure, and safety features. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a static, predictable, safe, and secure communication mechanism suitable for safety-critical cyber-physical systems. The communication mechanism has been designed as an extension of CLARE-Hypervisor, a new hypervisor fully designed and developed at the ReTiS Lab of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna to support real-time cyber physical systems on heterogeneous architectures. The implementation has been deployed and evaluated on a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZCU102 platform. Finally, an application has been developed to demonstrate the developed mechanism. The application consists of a cyber-physical system in which an inverted pendulm is controlled, while the system state is visualized through a graphical user interface, also allowing the user to change the plant parameters. The control part is handled by the Erika3 real-time kernel running on a virtual machine, while the user interface is handled by the Linux operating system, running on a different virtual machine