UVirtio: Enabling Ubiquitous Resource Sharing for RISC-V Industrial Edge Devices

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.