The proliferation of multicore processors and the desire to consolidate applications and functionality will push the embedded industry into embracing virtualization in much the same way it has been embraced in the server and compute-centric markets. However, there are many paths to virtualization for embedded systems. After a tour of those options and their pros and cons, Freescale Semiconductor’s Syed Shah shows why the bare metal hypervisor-based approach, coupled with hardware virtualization assists in the core, the memory subsystem and the I/O, offers the best performance.