Hardware-assisted virtualization targeting MIPS-based SoCs

Abstract

Virtualization has become a hot topic in embedded systems for both academia and industry development. Among its main advantages, we can highlight (i) software design quality; (ii) security levels of the system; (iii) software reuse, and; (iv) hardware utilization. However, it still presents constraints that have lessened the excitement towards itself, since the greater concerns are its implicit overhead and whether it is worthy or not. Thus, we detail how to adapt an existing MIPS-based architecture aiming to support the virtualization principles. In this paper we present detailed information about the architecture implementation and results demonstrating its correctness and efficiency.