Evaluation of Virtualization Technologies for Embedded Systems: Implemented on DM6437 Single-core DSP

Embedded systems are growing in functionality as well as in complexity. They are practically everywhere and are still gaining popularity in mission-critical, multimedia and medical environments. Due to the increasing complexity, they are prone to have critical faults. This is not desirable because it may threaten dedicated functions of the system. This is called real time functionality of the system. Real time functionality can be protected by running dedicated applications or real time applications, and general purpose applications separately. Virtualization has become a principle focus for the computer system design. It enables a single computer to have multiple clones of it running with different virtual software environments. It separates real time applications from general purpose applications by running them in these separate virtual environments. However, virtualization technology This thesis work focus on studying the feasibility of using virtualization in embedded domain by understanding concepts of virtualization and how well virtualization answers the challenges faced by the embedded system domain. Read more