Automotive infotainment applications are examples of embedded systems in which a heterogeneous software stack is used, which most likely comprises a real-time operating system, an automotive-grade Linux, and possibly Android. Thanks to the availability of modern systems-on-a-chip providing multicore computing platforms, architects have the possibility of integrating the entire software stack in a single chip. Embedded virtualization appears an interesting technology to achieve this goal, while providing the different operating systems the capability of exchanging data as well as optimizing resource usage. Although very well known in server-class systems, virtualization is rather new to the embedded domain; in order to leverage its benefits, it is therefore mandatory to understand its peculiarities and shortcomings. In this chapter, the authors illustrate the virtualization technologies with particular emphasis on hypervisors and Linux Containers. Moreover, they illustrate how those technologies can cooperate to fulfill the requirements on automotive infotainment applications. Finally, the authors report some experimental evidence of the performance overheads introduced when using embedded virtualization.
Performance evaluation of concurrent collections on high-performance multicore computing systems