Are you interested in operating systems and what lies beneath them?
Embedded virtualization is receiving increasing attention even in low-compute industrial automation and IoT devices, as it helps address security threats and enables OTA (Over-The-Air) software updates from a software architecture perspective. The challenge is that generic solutions or those requiring hardware acceleration are often simply too expensive to be practical in most real-world applications.
The topic is motivated by the paper “FVM: Practical Feather-Weight Virtualization on Commodity Microcontrollers” (IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol. 74, No. 7, July 2025), which presents a paravirtualization technique for lower-end devices without hardware virtualization support. The scope can range from a literature review through validation of the proposed solution and performance measurements to experimenting with your own ideas. You may choose the development board, guest operating systems to integrate (e.g., FreeRTOS), and programming language (C/C++/Rust/etc.) according to your interests.
Depending on the objectives set, this challenge can naturally be extended into a bachelor's thesis, master's thesis, or even an undergraduate research project (TDK). A Cortex-M4F-based development board can be provided upon request for the duration of the work.