Re: [Embedded-pv-devel] Xen with RTOS (such as Windows CE)

[Meng Xu <xumengpanda@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 11:37 PM, Emir Elkholy <emirelkholy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I will give regular Xen a try before attempting RT Xen.

Yes. Definitely! Try Xen first and then try the RTDS scheduler on Xen;
Then, if RTDS scheduler does not satisty your requirement, which I
don't think so, let me know and try RT-Xen. :-)

Looking forward to hearing your good news! :-D

Best,

Meng
>
> On Tue, Feb 9, 2016 at 3:28 PM, Dario Faggioli <dario.faggioli@xxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, 2016-02-08 at 09:59 -0800, Emir Elkholy wrote:
>> > Currently we boot Windows CE from a dos bootable drive using a
>> > program called biosloader on our x86 Baytrail board (Intel). After
>> > the BIOS loads our USB stick (or SSD) with the Windows CE image is
>> > loaded by BIOSloader. Would Xen be able to load Windows CE in a
>> > similar fashion?
>> >
>> So, I know nothing about Windows CE and how it's loaded.
>>
>> In general, you can boot and use as *pure* HVM Xen guest any unmodified
>> operating system. Whether it will run well, it's another pair of hands
>> (and that is the case with every hypervisor, actually)
>>
>> In fact, while CPU is probably going to be fine, for IO, having some
>> kind of paravirtualization in place would be desirable. And to achieve
>> that, you need the guest to support it, e.g. via specific drivers.
>> These drivers exists for Windows, but I've no idea whether they work on
>> CE too.
>>
>> However, maybe you can just statically assign (by means of what we call
>> "PCI passthrough") the device that you need high performance from to
>> your WinCE guest, in which case the lack of paravirt IO would not be an
>> issue...
>>
>> In summary, it's hard to tell, until someone tries. :-/
>>
>> > Has Xen ever been used with an RTOS like Windows CE?
>> >
>> People on this list have been working on using both QNX and Android as
>> Xen guest, but I don't personally know the exact status of this.
>>
>> There also has been a port of FreeRTOS (although, on ARM):
>>
>> http://www.xenproject.org/directory/directory/projects/240-GaloisInc-FreeRTOS-Xen.html
>>
>> > I would like to use Xen to run linux for our GUI and Windows CE for
>> > our real-time code.
>> >
>> That's a very interesting use case, and Xen is certainly capable of
>> making it happen, if you can work out the issues above.
>>
>> Things and features you may be interested in looking at are vcpu
>> pinning and/or vcpu hard and soft affinity, cpupools, and the RTDS
>> scheduler. Do ask about them either here or on the xen-users mailing
>> list (and keep me in Cc).
>>
>> Regards,
>> Dario
>> --
>> <<This happens because I choose it to happen!>> (Raistlin Majere)
>> -----------------------------------------------------------------
>> Dario Faggioli, Ph.D, http://about.me/dario.faggioli
>> Senior Software Engineer, Citrix Systems R&D Ltd., Cambridge (UK)
>>
>



-- 


-----------
Meng Xu
PhD Student in Computer and Information Science
University of Pennsylvania
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~mengxu/

_______________________________________________
Embedded-pv-devel mailing list
Embedded-pv-devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://lists.xenproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/embedded-pv-devel