Open Source Summit + ELC Europe 2018

2018 had a bumpy landing with the disclosure of hardware vulnerabilities in microprocessors. With Spectre and Meltdown leading the way, they enabled attackers to read private data from kernel and user space. Since then, several other hardware bugs were revealed.

Lower level system software such as operating systems or hypervisors needs to implement countermeasures to the vulnerabilities. The fixes come at a cost, particularly in execution time. Embedded real-time environments have a strong focus on low latency and determinism and may be affected by those fixes.

What’s the mitigation cost and impact on typical real-time applications? To answer these question, we use benchmarks as well as a set of microbenchmarks to quantify the consequences of the mitigations. Our targets are real-time operating systems, such as the Preempt-RT patch for Linux as well as embedded real-time hypervisors.