By Gernot Heiser, OK Labs
Virtualization has been a major factor in the enterprise space for years; several virtualization providers have become billion-dollar companies. More recently, virtualization has started to become a hot topic in the embedded systems areas. This is demonstrated by recent moves of the dominant providers of virtualization for the enterprise, VMware and Citrix, who are clearly developing business strategies for that space.
Are we therefore likely to see versions of Xen, KVM or the VMware hypervisor on embedded devices, or should embedded-systems developers even try to port one of the open source solutions themselves? The answer is ‘no’ for good technical reasons. First, let’s look at some of the virtualization use cases, which are considered for embedded systems.
