Full virtualization on low-end hardware: A case study

Abstract

Most hypervisors today rely either on (1) full virtualization on high-end hardware (i.e., hardware with virtualization extensions), (2) paravirtualization, or (3) both. These, however, do not fulfill embedded systems' requirements, or require legacy software to be modified. Full virtualization on low-end hardware (i.e., hardware without virtualization extensions), on the other end, has none of those disadvantages. However, it is often claimed that it is not feasible due to an unacceptably high virtualization overhead. We were, nevertheless, unable to find real-world quantitative results supporting those claims.