Evaluating the Performance and Behaviour of RT-XEN

Virtualization, together with real-time support emerges to be used in an increasing amount of use cases, varying from embedded systems to enterprise computing. One of the most popular open-source virtualization software’s is Xen. Its current implementation does not qualify it to be a candidate for timecritical systems. Researchers and developers extended it and claim the efficient usage of their versions in such systems. RT-Xen is one of these versions. It is a virtualization platform based on Compositional Scheduling and uses a suite of fixed-priority schedulers. This paper evaluates the performance and scheduling behaviour of RT-Xen. The test results show that only two proposed schedulers are suitable to be used for soft real-time applications.