Towards hardware embedded virtualization technology

Abstract

Embedded virtualization possesses inherent challenges which differentiate the domain from traditional virtualization application fields such as server and desktop computing. Standard software virtualization solutions have a negative impact, not only on memory footprint and performance, but also on determinism and interrupt latency which are critical for the embedded real-time domain. Thus, efficient embedded virtualization requires domain-specific software and hardware support. This paper presents work in progress results of hardware-based Hypervisor implementation. The use cases of embedded virtualization are analyzed, justifying the reasoning for hardware-supported virtualization. Architectural and micro-architectural improvements to an ARM v5TE processor are described, demonstrating the performance advantages, and compared against ARM Virtualization Extensions, identifying respective vulnerabilities and providing alternative solutions which enable higher flexibility, minimizing virtualization costs. The research roadmap towards a hardware-complete Hypervisor, based on the presented results, is described.