Evaluating Xenomai and KVM for Real-Time Virtualization in Industrial Automation

During the last years, industrial automation is more and more witnessing the usage of virtualization technologies to run real-time tasks. On the one hand, virtualization is a consolidated technology that aims at improving the manageability and scalability of industrial control systems. On the other hand, real-time tasks often require strict timing guarantees and determinism in the response time. In this paper, we consider a real-time virtualization platform based on the Xenomai real-time operating system and the KVM virtualization technology. The chosen technologies are open-source and fully compatible with Linux-based systems and ensure seamless integration and coexistence with existing applications. We assess the performance of the proposed architecture with a set of benchmarking experiments run on a B&R industrial computer.