Virtualization Technologies for Cars

Virtualization basically means realizing several runtime environments in parallel but strictly isolated on a shared hardware. Nowadays, virtualization is an accepted standard and is used in the desktop and server market as a genuine alternative solution to several individual dedicated hardware systems. Through today’s availability of modern and highly efficient virtualization solutions, virtualization becomes extremely interesting also for embedded applications. The following work first gives a short introduction on virtualization technologies in general. It then presents possible advantages and possible implications as well as feasible fields of application and implementation examples for automotive vehicles. This work will introduce several concrete virtualization solutions and evaluate their feasibility in the vehicular area, before it concludes with a detailed summary and a short outlook for the chances of virtualization technologies in future vehicular ECUs.