Kernel Design for Isolation and Assurance of Physical Memory

Embedded systems are evolving into increasingly complex software systems. One approach to managing this software complexity is to divide the system into smaller, tractable components and provide strong isolation guarantees between them. This paper focuses on one aspect of the system's behaviour that is critical to any such guarantee: management of physical memory resources. The authors present the design of a kernel that has formally demonstrated the ability to make strong isolation guarantees of physical memory. They also present the macro-level performance characteristics of a kernel implementing the proposed design.