Virtualization technology is well established in the server and desktop space, and has been spreading across different embedded industries, driven by the interest in consolidating and isolating multiple environments.

TrustZone technology, designed by ARM to guarantee security on its processors, ended up allowing the development of Hypervisors by exploiting this technology’s virtualization capabilities. The Lightweight TrustZone-assisted Hypervisor (LTZVisor), which allows multiple operating systems to run on the same hardware platform, is a design example that takes advantage of TrustZone technology for ARM application processors. As recently ARM decided to introduce this technology in the new generation of Cortex-M processors, there’s now possibility of developing a Hypervisor for these platforms as well.

Alternately to LTZVisor, the lLTZVisor framework is intended to focus on low-power consumption and size, due to the limitations imposed by its target ARM processors (Cortex-M23/33), which focus on deterministic real-time embedded processing, energy efficiency and (recently) security. This work proposes the development of the lLTZVisor framework and aims to provide the means to co-existence between multiple Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) on ARM Cortex-M23/33 processors.