Proteus Hypervisor: Full Virtualization and Paravirtualization for Multi-core Embedded Systems

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 PowerPC-based 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.

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