Challenging VMs on battery-powered embedded devices

Abstract

Many consumer devices, such as portable game consoles or cellphones, can be described as battery-powered wireless embedded devices. Many of these are not taking advantage of virtual machines, certainly not for their core tasks, instead relying on C or close derivatives for implementing their behaviour. However, faced with software that becomes more and more dynamic and hardware that is increasingly heterogeneous, the move to virtual machines is as necessary as it is unavoidable. From our own experience in developing software for battery-powered embedded devices we describe features that these upcoming virtual machines should possess in order to win over the embedded crowd and be a viable competitor against C, not just the only viable option.