Hardware-assisted Reliability Enhancement for Embedded Multi-core Virtualization Design

In this paper, we propose a virtualization architecture for the multi-core embedded system to provide more system reliability and security while maintaining the same performance without introducing additional special hardware supports or having to implement complex protection mechanism in the virtualization layer. Embedded virtualization design usually uses two kinds of approaches, traditional VMM and microkernel approaches, but both of them suffer from performance or engineering cost problems. To achieve better reliability and keep the virtualization layer design lightweighted, a common hardware component called local memory adopted in the multi-core embedded processors is used in this work. By taking this memory architecture's advantage, we can mitigate above-mentioned problems at once. We choose to re-map the virtualization layer's program called SPUMONE, which it runs all its guest systems in kernel space, on the local memory. By doing so, it can provide additional reliability and security for the entire system because the SPUMONE's design in a multi-core platform has each instance being installed on a separated processor core, which is different from the traditional virtualization layer design, and therefore the content of each SPUMONE in the local memory is inaccessible to each others.