Sharing data between processes running on different domains in para-virtualized xen

Recent embedded systems such as mobile phones provide various multimedia applications and execute them concurrently. Embedded systems are being developed to provide new unique solutions and services. This forces manufacturers of embedded systems to select a more productive and sophisticated operating system such as Linux. However, there are several limitations in using a general purpose operating system (GPOS) because of software instability and workload of transporting legacy real-time applications into the system. A good solution is to use a virtualization technology such as Xen, which allows many guest operating systems to be executed simultaneously and in a stable manner on one physical machine. If Xen is applied to embedded systems such as mobile phones, the Xen can execute the legacy real-time operating system for critical tasks and also GPOS executing user-friendly task. In this case, the Xen should provide the IPC mechanism between processes on each operating system on Xen. However, Xen doesn’t provide a simple way for sharing data between processes running on different guest operating systems. In this paper, we propose a simple method for sharing data between the processes in different guest operating systems by using a mechanism provided by Xen.