SIGMA system: A multi-OS environment for embedded systems

Embedded systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated and there exists a wide variety of requirements such as traditional realtime requirements, multimedia support, etc. It is hard to satisfy all of the requirements by a single OS. Would they be satisfied, the system would become complex and this would cause new problems. A multi OS environment is an efficient approach to deal with these problems and to satisfy complex requirements while keeping the system simple. We propose a multi OS environment named the SIGMA system targeted especially at multiprocessor architectures. On the SIGMA system, guest OSes are corresponded one-to-one with cores. As a result, opposing to existing multi OS environment using virtualization techniques, the system does not degrade the performance of the guest OSes. In addition, the guest OS running on the SIGMA system requires almost no modification to its source code.