In this modern era ruled by technology and the IoT (Internet of Things), embedded systems have an ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, and although they do differ from each other in their functionalities and end-purpose, they all share the same basic requirements: safety and security; requirements which must always be fulfilled in order to accomplish a reliable and trust-worthy system.

To address this problem many solutions are combining the use of a virtualization layer (Virtual-Machine Monitor or Hypervisor) with ARM’s TrustZone technology. This provides isolation by encapsulating each subsystem in separate Virtual-Machines, while also enabling sharing of hardware resources by the different applications. However, these isolated subsystems have, in some cases, the need to communicate with each other, thus the need of an Inter-Partition Communication mechanism. Furthermore, to better achieve a trustworthy and flawless base for the whole system, a Microkernel-based approach to Hypervisors is being used increasingly.

The μRTZVisor emerged as a solution to combine all the concepts and techniques mentioned above, presenting great real-time support while maintaining almost full-virtualization and the security-oriented architecture of other TrustZone based Hypervisors. Its Secure IPC mechanism merged with the capability-based system, while also making use of the real-time scheduler and memory management components, results in efficient and secure communication between partitions. However, there are some board features yet to be explored that could benefit the IPC’s performance and security, such as the board’s FPGA capabilities and the DMA peripheral, as well as cache coherent communication mechanisms.