  A promising approach for designing critical embedded systems is based on
virtualization technologies and multi-core platforms. These enable the
deployment of both real-time and general-purpose systems with different
criticalities in a single host. Integrating virtualization while also meeting
the real-time and isolation requirements is non-trivial, and poses significant
challenges especially in terms of certification. In recent years, researchers
proposed hardware-assisted solutions to face issues coming from virtualization,
and recently the use of Operating System (OS) virtualization as a more
lightweight approach. Industries are hampered in leveraging this latter type of
virtualization despite the clear benefits it introduces, such as reduced
overhead, higher scalability, and effortless certification since there is still
lack of approaches to address drawbacks. In this position paper, we propose the
usage of Intel's CPU security extension, namely SGX, to enable the adoption of
enclaves based on unikernel, a flavor of OS-level virtualization, in the
context of real-time systems. We present the advantages of leveraging both the
SGX isolation and the unikernel features in order to meet the requirements of
safety-critical real-time systems and ease the certification process.
