Virtualization technology can provide a transparent and efficient software development environment at the development phase of embedded systems. In addition, virtualization can be exploited to provide strong resource isolation between real-time applications. However, since virtualization incurs noticeable overheads, we need to minimize these to utilize virtualization technology for either a software development environment or a runtime environment of real-time embedded systems. In this letter, we particularly focus on virtualization overheads of network I/O and present an implementation of standardized (i.e., virtio) front-end network driver for a real-time operating system (RTOS). Although there have been several studies for virtio on general-purpose OS, our implementation is the first open-source virtio for an RTOS. The measurement results show that our implementation can improve the bandwidth and latency up to 168% and 52%, respectively. In addition, the memory usage can be saved up to 36%.

中文翻译：

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RTEMS 操作系统的 Virtio 前端网络驱动程序

虚拟化技术可以在嵌入式系统的开发阶段提供一个透明、高效的软件开发环境。此外，可以利用虚拟化在实时应用程序之间提供强大的资源隔离。然而，由于虚拟化会产生显着的开销，我们需要尽量减少这些开销，以便将虚拟化技术用于软件开发环境或实时嵌入式系统的运行时环境。在这封信中，我们特别关注网络 I/O 的虚拟化开销，并展示了实时操作系统 (RTOS) 的标准化（即 virtio）前端网络驱动程序的实现。尽管在通用操作系统上已经有一些关于 virtio 的研究，但我们的实现是第一个用于 RTOS 的开源 virtio。测量结果表明，我们的实现可以将带宽和延迟分别提高 168% 和 52%。此外，最多可节省 36% 的内存使用量。