SmartVisor
Disheng Su, Wenzhi Chen, Wei Huang, Haitao Shan, Yunhong Jiang · 2009
Embedded systems are making rapid changes and becoming increasingly sophisticated. To make full use of all the hardware resources on the system, multi OS environments and virtualization are both feasible ways but either needs lots of porting efforts or suffers performance degradation without hardware support for virtualization. We propose a virtualization platform for embedded system named the SmartVisor to provide a PC-compatible layer for guest OS, and it gains native-like performance while keeping zero-modification to guest OS by leveraging KVM and Intel's Atom embedded processor. SmartVisor realizes device pass-through by identity mapping of the guest memory and implements a Direct-Shadow mechanism to get rid of majority part of VMExit overhead. Measurement result shows the benefits of SmartVisor and deeper study of host-swapping reveals the potential advantages of SmartVisor on embedded systems.