Design of a real-time optimized emulation method

Abstract

Virtualization has become a key technology in the design of embedded systems. Within the scope of virtualization, emulation is a central aspect to overcome the limits induced by the heterogeneity of complex distributed embedded systems. Most of the techniques developed for the desktops and servers are not directly applicable to embedded systems due to their strict timing requirements. We will show the problems of existing emulation methods when applying them to embedded real-time systems and will propose a metric to determine the worst-case overhead caused by emulation. Based on this metrics we then propose an emulation method minimizing the worst-case overhead.