System virtualization's integration of multiple software stacks with maintained isolation on multi-core architectures has the potential to meet high functionality and reliability requirements in a resource efficient manner. Paravirtualization is the prevailing approach in the embedded domain. Its applicability is however limited, since not all operating systems can be ported to the paravirtualization application programming interface. Proteus is a multi-core hypervisor for PowerPCbased embedded systems, which supports both full virtualization and paravirtualization without relying on special hardware support. The hypervisor ensures spatial and temporal separation of the guest systems. The evaluation indicates a low memory footprint of 15 kilobytes and the configurability allows for an application-specific inclusion of components. The interrupt latencies and the execution times for hypercall handlers, emulation routines, and virtual machine context switches are analyzed.

Abstract. By the use of virtualization the security of a system can be significantly increased and performance can be improved by sharing hardware resources while reducing the overall costs of the whole system. Nowadays virtualization also finds approval within the field of embedded systems. However, the currently available virtualization platforms designed for embedded systems only support para-virtualization trying to provide reasonable performance and support realtime applications only by the use of dedicated resources. Our approach introduces a hybrid configurable hypervisor architecture designed to support real-time applications. We do not restrict the set of applications which can be run virtualized on top of our hypervisor to para-virtualized applications but also allow applications to run unmodified or even partly para-virtualized while using state of the art methodologies to obtain high performance.

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