Hardware-Specific Bare-Metal Microhypervisor Prototype

Hyper visors and virtual machines have become very popular in recent decade due to a number of indisputable advantages. But there is a dark side of this fact, especially for industry companies which are engaged into development of safety-relevant systems. The software becomes too complicated and bloated to meet all possible versions and configurations of hardware. As a result it´s difficult to certify it with compliance to safety standards such as IEC 61508. An attempt to go another way is undertaken in the research. The way is to develop a bare-metal hyper visor for a particular platform with a certain set of peripheral devices and thus to reduce lines of code significantly. This approach allows making the software faster and more reliable in exchange for flexibility. The hardware-specific bare-metal microhypervisor has been developed from the scratch for x86 quad-core CPU. It can run three real-time virtual machines on separated cores. The main achievements are just not above 10k lines of code and simplicity.