This morning we've made a couple of announcements that will hopefully surprise and delight the Real Time computing community. Wind River is releasing two new products that have their base in virtualization: Wind River's Hypervisor, and Wind River's MILS 2.0. Both of these products introduce platform virtualization, used in different ways. Wind River's implementations allow for a "floatilla" of OS's" to be run amongst a "sea of Cores" - it can be run as a one-to-many, many-to-many, or many-to one configuration (that is with SMP, one OS can be run by many cores, the Hypervisor is capable of running / scheduling many OS's among many cores, and both the Hypervisor and MILS 2.0 are capable of running many OS's over one shared core).
Both of these products are very high-powered and sophisticated. Both products are designed with an eye to the future. The Hypervisor itself can be used in SMP, AMP, Supervised-AMP and cooperative multicore configurations, and can also be configured to paravirtualize several Operating Systems and run them all (time-share style) on a single core. The MILS 2.0 product is designed specifically to paravirtualize OS's and run them on a single shared-core with a high degree of separation maintained by the MILS 2.0 separation kernel.
Many of our customers have built multiprocessor systems, sometimes because there wasn't enough horsepower on one board to handle the needs of their system, sometimes because of a need to keep data processing nodes separate (security). With today's processors, you may be able to replace a multi-board system with either a single multicore board running Hypervisor or a single board running a modern (single) core with our MILS 2.0 separation kernel. Both products allow a number of instances of VxWorks to run on paravirtualized platforms, or run without an OS at all (bare-metal or minimal executive, etc), and the Hypervisor also supports Wind River's Linux on paravirtualized platforms.
So what is virtualization? I think of virtualization as a star-trek like copy machine, where you start off with a computer, and make "virtual" copies of it. The copy can have anything that's already on the real machine, or a subset of those features. The Hypervisor schedules those copies to run on the real machine, making them believe they are completely in control. This can allow you to replace several older machines with one virtualized machine and get the same work done.
Some popular examples include VMware, Parallels, and QEMU. These are all available for desktop machines, allowing users to create polymorphic environments. These are mostly "type-2" hypervisors, meaning the hypervisor is a guest running under a main operating system and is subject to the whims of that OS. Wind River's implmentations are "Type 1", meaning our Hypervusor runs as the only supervisory access code on the system and has absolute control over the system.
I'm pretty excited about this. It brings supercomputing into the embedded realm!


As an Engineering Specialist, it is Mike Deliman's responsibility to enable customers to achieve success in their endeavors, assist sales groups in evangelizing Wind River's technologies, and bring feedback of customer needs and experiences back into Marketing and Engineering. Mike has over 15 years of experience with VxWorks. 



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