Open Source Summit North America 2022

Xen Project is a static partitioning hypervisor for embedded deployments (industrial, medical, etc.) Xen enforces strong isolation between domains so that one cannot affect the execution of another. Features such as cache coloring reduce interference and improve interrupt latency and determinism. A real-time workload can run alongside a more complex guest. But can it be used in safety-critical environments? The Xen hypervisor has a microkernel design: services and tools are non-essential and run in unprivileged VMs, while the core is less than 50K LOC. This architecture lends itself well to safety-critical applications as only the core is critical and needs to go through the certification process. This presentation will describe the activities of the Xen FuSa SIG (Special Interest Group) to make Xen easier to safety-certify. It will go through the aspects of Xen that pertain safety and it will explain how to set up a mixed-criticality system with Xen. The talk will discuss the challenges of making an Open Source project safety-certifiable and the progress that the Xen community made so far in the areas of documentation and requirements, MISRA-C code compliance, and interference reduction.