Proteus, a hybrid virtualization platform for embedded systems

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.