Wind River today announced the immediate availability of Wind River Hypervisor, a key pillar of Wind River’s comprehensive Multicore Software Solution for device development. Wind River Hypervisor is a high-performance Type-1 hypervisor, which supports virtualization on single and multicore processors. It provides integration with Wind River’s industry leading operating systems (VxWorks and Wind River Linux) and supports other operating systems. The Wind River Workbench development tools suite has been extended to support developing software that runs on the Wind River Hypervisor.
Wind River Hypervisor enables virtualization for devices across a broad range of market segments, including aerospace and defense, automotive, consumer devices, industrial, and networking. Within these markets, embedded developers are adopting hypervisors to enable the replacement of multiple boards or CPUs with a single board and/or a single CPU, create innovative new devices that leverage multiple operating systems, and reduce complexity when integrating multicore processors. The benefits of using the Wind River Hypervisor include reduced hardware costs and power consumption, opportunity for innovation, and accelerated time-to-market.
Wind River makes it easier for customers to consolidate their systems and adopt multicore technology in devices by using key features in Wind River Hypervisor, including:
- Support for single and multicore processors;
- Focus on real-time aspects such as performance, latency, determinism and minimal footprint;
- Protection between operating systems and cores, including starting, stopping, reloading operating systems to increase reliability; and
- Highly optimized silicon-specific hardware support.
The introduction of Wind River Hypervisor enhances Wind River’s comprehensive Multicore Software Solution, which consists of three pillars:
- Operating system choice including a high-performance integration with the industry’s leading real-time operating system VxWorks and commercial-grade Linux platform Wind River Linux, and the ability to integrate other operating systems into the same system;
- A broad and flexible set of multicore software configurations with support for Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP), Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) and supervised AMP, and virtualization; and
- A unified development environment based on Wind River Workbench for configuring, building, diagnosing, and analyzing the software for hypervisor-based systems, including the VxWorks and Wind River Linux operating systems and the applications running on these operating systems.
Earlier this year, Wind River introduced VxWorks 6.7, which allows system designers to select the optimal multicore design configuration, AMP or SMP, to deliver next-generation devices with higher performance while maintaining or reducing power consumption. Now, Wind River Hypervisor enables systems designers to use a supervised AMP configuration that makes an AMP system easier to configure.
Separately, Wind River also announced today VxWorks MILS Platform 2.0, the latest addition to the industry-leading VxWorks product portfolio, which leverages Wind River Hypervisor technology to provide virtualization. The virtualization provided by the hypervisor, coupled with the security properties of the entire VxWorks MILS separation kernel, results in a MILS architecture designed to provide a high level of assurable security.
