The Role of Virtualization in Embedded Systems

System virtualization, which enjoys immense popularity in the en-terprise and personal computing spaces, is recently gaining signifi-cant interest in the embedded domain. Starting from a comparison of key characteristics of enterprise systems and embedded systems, we will examine the difference in motivation for the use of sys-tem virtual machines, and the resulting differences in the require-ments for the technology. We find that these differences are quite substantial, and that virtualization is unable to meet the special re-quirements of embedded systems. Instead, more general operating-systems technologies are required, which support virtualization as a special case. We argue that high-performance microkernels, specif-ically L4, are a technology that provides a good match for the re-quirements of next-generation embedded systems. 1