Inline Emulation for Paravirtualization Environment on Embedded Systems

Virtualization has been widely adopted on servers for various purposes such as server consolidation, cloud computing, and so on. Recent years, the trend spreads on embedded systems, although it once seemed to be an impractical idea because of the limited capability of embedded processors. To further lower the overhead of adopting virtualization on embedded systems, we design an optimization technique, called inline emulation, to reduce the cost spending on paravirtualizing operating systems. Inline emulation can also be used in various virtualization environments to increase the performance of emulating privileged instructions. We implement inline emulation for ARMv5 architecture and evaluate in Android Emulator. The result shows it runs much faster, up to 7.4 times, than the common Para virtualization technique for cache-related operations and suggests that it not only lowers the development cost but also increases system responsiveness.