Spacecraft Hypervisor Implementing Modularity and Security (SHIMS)

Incorporating hypervisor-based software virtualization into spacecraft architectures offers the capability to integrate payload software in a plug-and-play fashion, enabling more flexible and reconfigurable platforms. The hypervisor allows the payload software to be implemented in an abstracted, virtualized environment, which isolates the payload software from core spacecraft functions and offers significant advantages for payload development efficiency, modularity, re-use, integration, and test. A virtualized software payload can also be executed on different spacecraft implementations without modification. Fault tolerance can be achieved by running redundant instances of payload software. Using an I/O virtualized hypervisor, triple modular redundancy (TMR) can be implemented without requiring three unique instances of the compute hardware. For Phase I, Arkyd Astronautics proposes to develop a set of quantitative metrics for a spacecraft hypervisor, evaluate a set of existing hypervisor products against those criteria, and then extend one of those solutions to create a proof of concept spacecraft hypervisor. For Phase I (option), the proof-of-concept hypervisor would be extended to implement a voting mechanism for hardware/software interactions using software TMR. The hypervisor would be measured against the selected performance metrics, and evaluated for TMR operation in the presence of faults introduced into software payloads.