A Comprehensive Survey on the Use of Hypervisors in Safety-Critical Systems

Virtualization has become one of the main tools for making efficient use of the resources offered by multicore embedded platforms. In recent years, even sectors such as space, aviation, and automotive, traditionally wary of adopting this type of technology due to the impact it could have on the safety of their systems, have been forced to introduce it into their day-to-day work, as their applications are becoming increasingly complex and demanding. This article provides a comprehensive review of the research work that uses or considers the use of a hypervisor as the basis for building a virtualized safety-critical embedded system. Once the hypervisors developed or adapted for this type of system have been identified, an exhaustive qualitative comparison is made between them. an exhaustive qualitative comparison is made between them. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that all this information is collected in a single article. Therefore, the main contribution of this article is that it collects and categorizes the information of each hypervisor and compares them with each other, so that this article can be used as a starting point for future researchers in this area, who will be able to quickly check which hypervisor is best suited to their research needs.