A real-time hypervisor for embedded systems with hardware virtualization support

Abstract

Embedded systems are becoming more and more complex. In addition, they also have requirements for security and real-time behavior. The virtualization technology has emerged as one of the solutions to satisfy these requirements. Recently, some embedded processors have extensions for hardware virtualization and hypervisors began to use these extensions. But most of existing hypervisors are designed for general purpose systems and rely on large stacks. Thus, they cause security problems and heavy overhead. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a thin full-virtualization Type-1 hypervisor for real-time embedded systems using ARM processors. We discuss how this implementation affects real-time property of systems. Our implementation demonstrated multiple guest operating systems (OS) can be run in independent environments with distinct real-time scheduling policies.