Virtual Processors for Industrial Applications

The degree of sophistication of operating systems involved in factory automation has increased steadily in recent years, leading to products that provide the concurrent execution of process control functions and general-purpose applications. This paper gives some insights on the use of virtualization techniques on an ARM processor, in order to support the coexistence of multiple operating systems on the same physical machine, devoted to different classes of functions -- such as, for example, a real-time operating system for process control and a general-purpose operating system for man-machine interface. With respect to competing approaches, processor virtualization has the main advantage of not requiring any modification to the operating systems it hosts, along with a better modularity.