Hypervisor in Automotive - Critical Use cases

Background

Hypervisor is a well known hardware virtualization technique that allows multiple virtual machines called guests identified by their OS to run on a host system. The virtual guests have access (exclusive or shared) to underlying hardware resources including CPU, memory and peripherals. In the context of the virtual guest, it appears as if all of the allocated hardware is natively available exclusively to that machine. Hypervisor in most cases also provides a means of controlling the execution state of the virtual guests. Hypervisors are increasingly being used in modern automotive software systems for combining safety critical and safety agnostic platforms as well as for consolidating multiple ECU functions into one.

Purpose

The purpose of this document is to capture the critical use cases that needs to be considered for using an Hypervisor in the context of automotive in vehicle infotainment. As Instrument clusters functions fall in adjacent yet very close domain, some of the cross functional aspects between clusters and infotainment needs to be considered as well. The objective of defining these critical use cases is to create a sounding base for defining candidate system requirements and model architecture covering the type of hypervisor as well as resource sharing

Assumption

The following are the assumptions that the reader needs to make while going through the use cases. Eventually, it may be possible to challenge the assumption itself and arrive at contradictory architectures that may be even better and well suited for all practical purposes. 

Use cases