VIRTUALIZATION – THE POWER AND LIMITATIONS FOR MILITARY EMBEDDED SYSTEMS – A STRUCTURED DECISION APPROACH

Virtualization is becoming an important technology for military embedded systems. The advantages to using virtualization start with its ability to facilitate porting to new hardware designs or integrating new software and applications onto existing platforms. Virtualization is a tool to reuse existing legacy software on new hardware and to combine new features alongside existing proven software. For embedded systems, especially critical components of military systems, virtualization techniques must have the ability to meet performance requirements when running application software in a virtual environment. Together, these needs define the key factors driving the development of hypervisor products for the embedded market: a desire to support and preserve legacy code, software that has been field-proven and tested over years of use; and a need to ensure that real-time performance is not compromised.

Embedded-systems developers need to understand the power and limitations of virtualization. This paper presents virtualization technologies and its application to embedded systems. With the dominant market of multi-core processing systems, the need for performing specific hardware/software configuration and usages with relations to Platform Virtualization is becoming more and more prevalent. This paper will discuss different architectures, with security being emphasized to overcome challenges, through the use of a structures decision matrix. This matrix will cover the best suited technology to perform a specific function or use-case for a particular architecture chosen. The topics of the “Best Suited Technologies” to utilize when considering Virtualization will cover the following architectures: Virtualization – Hypervisors, Hyper-Threading, Single-Core CPU Architectures, Multi-core CPU Architectures and Microkernels.

It discusses the possibilities and limitation of plain virtualization approaches in embedded systems. These relate to the integrated nature of embedded systems with security and reliability requirements.