Wind River adds virtualization to multicore s/w

ALAMEDA, USA: Wind River has 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 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.

“Wind River Hypervisor brings virtualization to devices so embedded developers can achieve improved device functionality on smaller form factors,” said Tomas Evensen, chief technology officer, Wind River. “We’re responding to significant market demand by extending our industry-leading multicore software solution to include a high-performance hypervisor for virtualization.”

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.

“We expect that an increasing number of embedded engineering teams will look toward virtualization as a critical development solution,” said Stephen Balacco, director of the Embedded Software and Tools Practice at VDC Research Group.

“Wind River’s announcement of its hypervisor indicates that they are closely aligned with the direction the industry is heading and the potential needs of their customers going forward,” Balacco added.

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.