ACRN: a big little hypervisor for IoT development

With the rapid growth of Internet of Things (IoT) and the new emerging IoT computing paradigm such as edge computing, it is prevalent to see that today’s real-time and functional safety devices, particularly in industrial IoT and automotive scenarios, are getting multi-functional by combining multiple platforms into single product. The new trend potentially prompts embedded virtualization as a promising solution in terms of workload consolidation, separation, and cost- effective. However, hypervisors, such as KVM and XEN, are designed to run on a server and can not be easily restructured to fulfill the requirements such as real-time constrains from IoT products. Meanwhile, existing embedded virtualization solutions are normally tailored towards specific IoT scenarios, which makes them hard to extend towards various scenarios. In addition, most commercial solutions are mature and appealing but expensive and closed-source. This paper presents ACRN, a flexible, lightweight, scalable, and open source embedded hypervisor for IoT development. By focusing on CPU and memory partitioning, and mean- while optionally offloading embedded I/O virtualization to a tiny user space device model, ACRN presents a consolidated system satisfying real-time and general-purpose needs simultaneously. By adopting customer-friendly permissive BSD license, ACRN provides a practical industry-grade solution with immediate readiness. In this paper we will de- scribe the design and implementation of ACRN, and conduct thorough evaluations to demonstrate its feasibility and effectiveness. The source code of ACRN has been released at https://github.com/projectacrn/acrn-hypervisor.