Processor virtualization on embedded linux systems

The advent of increasingly powerful low-power processors offers new opportunities for embedded systems. Instead of multiple small microprocessors devoted to a single task, a centralized multi-core processor can be used to run all applications, while ensuring isolation and resources allocation for critical tasks. Seeing a growing interest for bringing virtualization on embedded systems, IP suppliers, such as ARM, added hardware extensions to their architectures for providing a native virtualization support.KVM is an open source hypervisor integrated in the Linux Kernel and offering ARM support. A prototype running KVM/ARM on the TI OMAP5432 uEVM board, with complete software stack for simplifying virtual machines management has been created during this work. The benchmarks executed show an overhead of 1% to 3% for CPU intensive applications but also demonstrate a performance degradation of about 60% for memory-intensive applications such as matrix multiplication. Paravirtualized vs. emulated devices have been analyzed, pointing out the extremely poor performance of emulated devices, while paravirtualized devices achieve near native performance.