Shedding light on static partitioning hypervisors for arm-based mixed-criticality systems

In this paper, we aim to understand the properties and guarantees of static partitioning hypervisors (SPH) for Armbased mixed-criticality systems (MCS). To this end, we performed a comprehensive empirical evaluation of popular open-source SPH, i.e., Jailhouse, Xen (Dom0-less), Bao, and seL4 CAmkES VMM, focusing on two key requirements of modern MCS: real-time and safety. The goal of this study is twofold. Firstly, to empower industrial practitioners with hard data to reason about the different trade-offs of SPH. Secondly, we aim to raise awareness of the research and open-source communities to the still open problems in SPH by unveiling new insights regarding lingering weaknesses. All artifacts will be open-sourced to enable independent validation of results and encourage further exploration on SPH.We would like to express our gratitude to the reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions, as well as to our friendly shepherd for guiding us in making final improvements. Additionally, we appreciate the time and thoughtful input from all the representatives of SPH, namely Ralf Ramsauer (Jailhouse), Stefano Stabellini (Xen), and Gernot Heiser (seL4/CAmkES-VMM). Jose Martins was supported by FCT grant SFRH/BD/138660/2018. This work is supportedby FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia within the RD Units Project Scope UIDB/00319/2020, and European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101070537, project CROSSCON (Cross-platform Open Security Stack for Connected Devices)