Embedded Hypervisor Xvisor: A Comparative Analysis

Abstract

Virtualization technology has shown immense popularity within embedded systems due to its direct relationship with cost reduction, better resource utilization, and higher performance measures. Efficient hypervisors are required to achieve such high performance measures in virtualized environments, while taking into consideration the low memory footprints as well as the stringent timing constraints of embedded systems. Although there are a number of open-source hypervisors available such as Xen, Linux KVM and OKL4 Micro visor, this is the first paper to present the open-source embedded hypervisor Extensible Versatile hyper Visor (Xvisor) and compare it against two of the commonly used hypervisors KVM and Xen in-terms of comparison factors that affect the whole system performance. Experimental results on ARM architecture prove Xvisor's lower CPU overhead, higher memory bandwidth, lower lock synchronization latency and lower virtual timer interrupt overhead and thus overall enhanced virtualized embedded system performance.