Profiling Applications for a Virtual Machine on an Embedded System

Abstract

Virtualization has turned in to a commonly used term in the enterprise and personal computing domain and its application areas are also continuously expanding from servers to desktops and on to embedded systems. Virtualization on an embedded system on the onset itself is challenging due to the resource-constrained nature of embedded systems. The focus of this work is to create a virtual environment on an embedded system and thereby to run multiple VMs on the same hardware. This work also presents developing profiling tools for profiling applications on the above virtual machine (VM). As an outcome of this work, we could run multiple VMs on a microkernel-based virtual environment. We extended the functionality of L4Linux running on a microkernel-based virtual environment to support ‘perf’, the commonly used profiling tool in Linux. The experimental results show the accuracy of the tool to identify resource utilization on a virtual machine. This enables resource optimization and further possibilities for virtualization on embedded systems.