Modern automotive high-performance computing (HPC) platforms demand robust, certifiable isolation between safety-critical and general-purpose workloads. This session demonstrates how the Xen hypervisor on ARM64 leveraging its EL2 core and advanced features like alternate P2M (altp2m), Virtual Machine Introspection (VMI), and the Xen Test Framework (XTF), can host a lean, certifiable safety monitor alongside a Linux guest. By intercepting and monitoring data memory of Safety Applications, Xen enforces safety policies at runtime, ensures freedom from interference, preserves integrity of critical data flows, and continuously verifies key safety invariants. The architecture described aligns with ISO 26262 up to ASIL B, enabling qualification of open-source components for mixed-criticality automotive systems.

Shortbio

Aquib Javaid

Aqib Studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore. Afterwards, he worked on an on-board computer for a micro-satellite at the Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Centre. Additionally, he worked at Mentor Graphics as the Technical Lead of their virtualization solutions. In 2018, Aqib joined Elektrobit and led the safety certification of Elektrobit’s Hypervisor. Currently, he is working on technical solutions that enable the use of Linux for safety-related applications, leading to EB corbos Linux for Safety Applications.

Stefano Stabellini

Stefano Stabellini is a Fellow at AMD, where he leads system software architecture and the virtualization team. Previously, at Aporeto, he created a virtualization-based security solution for containers and authored several security articles. As Senior Principal Software Engineer in Citrix, he led a small group of passionate engineers working on Open Source projects. Stefano has been involved in Xen development since 2007. He created libxenlight in November 2009 and started the Xen port to ARM with virtualization extensions in 2011. Today he is a Xen Project committer, and he maintains Xen on ARM and Xen support in Linux and QEMU.

Friday, September 26, 9 AM