The continued growth of processing capabilities and new features introduced with the ARM®v8 based System-on-Chip has made virtualization a realistic option for embedded system developers. With virtualization, system architects can design solutions that reduce the size, weight, power, and cost of legacy systems by consolidating disparate software functions onto a single chip, even if those different software functions require different operating systems or otherwise incompatible software stacks. Virtualization allows architects to partition and isolate software components with different safety, security, or licensing requirements. The virtual machine manager, or hypervisor, is the key piece of software technology enabling virtualization. Open source hypervisor, Xen, supports the ARMv8 processor family.
