Adding virtualization support in MIPS 4Kc-based MPSoCs

Virtualization has emerged as a feasible technique for Embedded Systems, providing safer platforms, improving design quality and reducing manufacturing costs. However, its inherit overhead still prevent its wide adoption. Most of the current attempts use the para-virtualization technique that imposes the cost of performing comprehensive changes in the guest OS. We propose the adoption of full-virtualization for MPSoCs, where no guest OS changes are required and, in order to reduce known virtualization overheads, we propose some hardware modifications to a MIPS-based architecture. We conducted experiments that demonstrate our proposal by comparing its processing and communication overheads against a non-virtualized solution.