Design and Implementation of Real-Time Control Groups in the Linux kernel

This thesis describes the design and the implementation of Real-Time Control Groups, a mechanism of the Linux kernel that allows running applications with real-time requirements in a containerized virtual environment, guaranteeing timing and noninterference properties. The code, inspired by an existing patchset, has been redesigned to be efficient and easily maintainable, much less invasive than the previous prototype, taking advantage of the 'dl_server' infrastructure available in the latest versions of the kernel. The proposed patchset has been extensively tested to verify that no error state is reachable. The correct behavior of the scheduler, in terms of timing guarantees, has been assessed by running experiments with artificial timing requirements and through a set of realtime applications based on the FastFlow parallel programming framework.