Work-in-Progress: Real-Time Containers for Large-Scale Mixed-Criticality Systems

This paper presents the notion of real-time containers, or rt-cases, conceived as the convergence of software container technologies, such as Linux Containers and/or Docker, and real-time operating systems. The idea is to allow critical containers, characterized by stringent timeliness and reliability requirements, to cohabit with traditional non real-time containers on the same hardware. The approach allows to keep the advantages of real-time virtualization, largely adopted in the industry, while reducing its inherent scalability limitation when to be applied to large-scale mixed-criticality systems. The paper provides a reference architecture scheme for implementing the real-time container concept on top on a patched real-time Linux kernel, and it overviews the challenges to be faced to implement the rt-case vision.