Real-time containers are a promising solution to reduce latencies in time-sensitive cloud systems. Recent efforts are emerging to extend their usage in industrial edge systems with mixed-criticality constraints. In these contexts, isolation becomes a major concern: a disturbance (such as timing faults or unexpected overloads) affecting a container must not impact the behavior of other containers deployed on the same hardware. In this paper, we propose a novel architectural solution to achieve isolation in real-time containers, based on real-time co-kernels, hierarchical scheduling, and time-division networking. The architecture has been implemented on Linux patched with the Xenomai co-kernel, extended with a new hierarchical scheduling policy, named SCHED_DS, and integrating the RTNet stack. Experimental results are promising in terms of overhead and latency compared to other Linux-based solutions. More importantly, the isolation of containers is guaranteed even in presence of severe co-located disturbances, such as faulty tasks (elapsing more time than declared) or high CPU, network, or I/O stress on the same machine.
@InProceedings{barletta_et_al:LIPIcs.ECRTS.2022.15, author = {Barletta, Marco and Cinque, Marcello and De Simone, Luigi and Della Corte, Raffaele}, title = {{Achieving Isolation in Mixed-Criticality Industrial Edge Systems with Real-Time Containers}}, booktitle = {34th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2022)}, pages = {15:1--15:23}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-239-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2022}, volume = {231}, editor = {Maggio, Martina}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2022.15}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-163328}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2022.15}, annote = {Keywords: Real-time, Mixed-criticality, Containers, Edge computing} }
Feedback for Dagstuhl Publishing