UVirtio: Enabling Ubiquitous Resource Sharing for RISC-V Industrial Edge Devices
TL;DR
UVirtio introduces a device-profile-based virtual hardware abstraction layer that minimizes performance overhead, and implements a live migration mechanism using differential packing, providing a scalable and agile virtualization solution for the ubiquitous computing frontier.
Abstract
The proliferation of IoT devices necessitates ubiquitous operating systems (UOS) for dynamic industrial edge scenarios, which face challenges including real-time demands and resource fragmentation. Existing virtualization methods are often too heavy or inflexible for these environments. In this paper, we present UVirtio, a lightweight ubiquitous virtualization mechanism that enables efficient resource sharing across distributed edge devices. UVirtio introduces a device-profile-based virtual hardware abstraction layer that minimizes performance overhead. The system facilitates the collaboration and aggregation of edge devices, improving the throughput of sensor data by over 37.6% and enabling complex tasks such as face recognition on pooled AI accelerators. Furthermore, UVirtio implements a live migration mechanism using differential packing, achieving sub-40 millisecond downtime for dynamic resource reallocation, thus providing a scalable and agile virtualization solution for the ubiquitous computing frontier. Our work is open source at https://github.com/muliangshou/UVirtio/tree/main.
