VOSySmonitoRV: a mixed criticality virtualization solution for RISC-V

Showcased at RISC-V 2023 Summit in Beijing demonstration

At the RISC-V Summit 2023 held in Beijing, China, Virtual Open Systems showcases a new VOSySmonitoRV demonstration, adding functionality to a previous demonstration.

Despite still no hardware is implementing the ratified RISC-V hypervisor extension (H), this demo implements a virtualization, based on VOSySmonitoRV, tailored to use cases where safety is of utmost importance. VOSySmonitoRV is configured to simultaneously run three OSes on a Lichee Pi 4A board, a powerful RISC-V board manufactured by Sipeed featuring a quad-cores TH1520 SoC. Specifically, there are two FreeRTOS instances running each of them on a dedicated core. The two cores remaining are running Linux with a car cluster application mockup with two gauges (RPMs and speed of the car).

The most safety-constrained tasks are run in the two RTOS. The first instance retrieves the speed of the car, while the second the RPMs of the engine. These two pieces of information are shared in real-time with the Linux instance, thanks to a shared memory located in Linux’s memory. Linux, in turn, renders these to screen via a QT5 application taken from the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project and modified for the demonstration.

This work is a result of the research activities led by Virtual Open Systems in Vitamin-V HorizonEurope project.