A Survey on Hypervisor-based Virtualization of Embedded Reconfigurable Systems

The increase of size, capabilities, and speed of FPGAs enables the shared usage of reconfigurable resources by multiple applications and even operating systems. While research on FPGA virtualization in HPC-datacenters and cloud is already well advanced, it is a rather new concept for embedded systems. The necessity for FPGA virtualization of embedded systems results from the trend to integrate multiple environments into the same hardware platform. As multiple guest operating systems with different requirements, e.g., regarding real-time, security, safety, or reliability share the same resources, the focus of research lies on isolation under the constraint of having minimal impact on the overall system. Drivers for this development are, e.g., computation intensive AI-based applications in the automotive or medical field, embedded 5G edge computing systems, or the consolidation of electronic control units (ECUs) on a centralized MPSoC with the goal to increase reliability by reducing complexity. This survey outlines key concepts of hypervisor-based virtualization of embedded reconfigurable systems. Hypervisor approaches are compared and classified into FPGA-based hypervisors, MPSoC-based hypervisors and hypervisors for distributed embedded reconfigurable systems. Strong points and limitations are pointed out and future trends for virtualization of embedded reconfigurable systems are identified.