EEMBC, Prpl Foundation to benchmark hypervisors
The two community-driven organizations have said they want to advance the use of security-by-separation in Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices. Prpl states that “the collaboration aims to shatter the perception that the use of hardware virtualization in low-power embedded devices comes with big performance and energy overheads,” by developing an industry-standard hypervisor benchmark.
Prpl Foundation, founded in 2015, is associated with Imagination Technologies Group plc and the MIPS processor architecture which provides support for hardware virtualization.
Markus Levy, president of EEMBC, and Art Swift, president of Prpl Foundation, will co-chair the joint EEMBC/Prpl HyperBench Working Group. The aim of the group will be to assess the performance of new lightweight embedded hypervisors paired with System on Chips (SoCs) with hardware support for virtualization.
Hardware virtualization and security through isolation, or separation of users widely used in the datacentre but traditionally not used in embedded, resource-constrained devices. This is partly because embedded processing traditionally used to run a single application and where that wasn’t the case the it was thought the overhead of server-style security measures could not be justified economically.
Next: Levy and Swift
“EEMBC sees value in HyperBench in two ways. The first way follows our traditional model of creating benchmarks to help system developers select the most optimal processing solution for their applications; in this case, HyperBench will allow processor vendors to fairly demonstrate their performance advantages,” said Levy, in a statement issued by The Prpl Foundation. “In the second way, HyperBench will help out the industry in general by demonstrating that with advanced hardware assist for virtualization, the performance impact of hypervisors will be minimal.”
The joint working group will create an architecture and operating system neutral benchmark tool to support vendors of processors, hypervisors, and operating systems, as well as their customers – the IoT system designers.
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