A Practical Look at Micro-Kernels and Virtual Machine Monitors

This paper looks at two different approaches used to provide embedded system support for virtualization and virtual machine monitors for consumer electronics and mobile devices. The paper compares the micro-kernel approach, which has been a popular choice for building embedded operating systems with the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) or hypervisor approach widely deployed in general purpose computing environments such as desktops and data center servers. Comparison criteria are based on virtualization use cases that are typical of Consumer Electronics (CE) systems such as mobile devices and IPTV. These approaches are further evaluated based on performance and on their ability to allow re-use of existing (often real-time) software as well as modern open operating systems such as Linux while remaining as transparently as possible.