Brief Industry Paper: Tenma: A Real-time LibOS Developed for Industry Embedded Systems

Wireless communication base stations have strong requirements in flexibility, performance and real-time responsiveness. Building an application-specific lightweight LibOS on a general OS is a good technique to make a balance among real-time responsiveness, performance and flexibility. Compared to traditional ext-kernel systems, the fast progress of virtualization technology brings a more efficient implementation of LibOS. In this paper, we propose a virtualization assisted real-time LibOS system named Tenma for wireless Baseband Unit (BBU). In Tenma, lightweight process virtualization, enhanced isolation between host OS and guest OS, interrupt direct-pass and application specific lightweight scheduling are used to guarantee the requirements of performance and real-time responsiveness while keeping system flexibility. The Tenma system is already in commercial deployment. Experiments in practice prove that it can meet the requirements of wireless base station applications.