Performance analysis of virtualized embedded computing systems

Virtualization has provided flexibility on a wide range of platforms such as high performance servers to personal computers. Naturaly the next frontier is embedded systems. Even though embedded devices have many resource limitations, virtualization offers advantages such as isolation and security. This paper briefly describes three among the different virtualization approaches for embedded systems. The goal is to understand the performance characteristics of various virtualization types. A benchmarking tool is used to measure the processor performance. The chosen approaches are of microkernel or hypervisor category. The first one is QEMU which is a Type 2 hypervisor and the second one is a microkernel based approach. The third one is a Type 1 Xen hypervisor. The performance measurement is done using QEMU and it is compared with numbers obtained from some of the popular embedded devices. Our observations regarding hypervisor performance are discussed to form conclusions on why some of the virtualization features are important.