Virtualization Techniques for Embedded Systems

Like existing commodity computer systems, embedded systems are no more small, static, stable nor safe. They have huge amount of source codes, interact with the internet, download and install applications from external, which incur the increase of bugs and security holes. To solve these problems, we propose to leverage virtualization techniques on embedded systems. We ported a machine emulator supporting various architectures to run on a microkernel that runs on several architectures. In this paper, we discuss benefits of using virtualization techniques on embedded system, introduce the implementation and the evaluation of a machine emulator running on a microkernel, and discuss some issues using our system on embedded systems.