Mark Hermeling

Consolidate, Consolidate, Consolidate

Many telecom applications are actually built up from multiple smaller sub-applications, often running on their own server in a rack, ATCA or otherwise. These servers run on multi-core processors, depending on the age of the last refresh this could be a dual, quad core or more. This is of course nothing new, what's new is how virtualization can improve server utilization. Continue reading "Consolidate, Consolidate, Consolidate" »

Type 1 versus Type 2 Hypervisors

I have always found the difference between Type 1 vs Type 2 hypervisors rather uninteresting. In short, a type-1 hypervisor is a hypervisor that has direct access to the hardware, where a type-2 hypervisor executes inside an operating system. Most hypervisors are type-1 hypervisors, including IT hypervisors such as VMWare, Xen, KVM and such. Type-2 hypervisors are applications like VMWare Workstation (or Fusion), Parallels, .... The distinction between type-1 versus type-2 is really not as useful as most people think. There is a good blog article by Anthony Liguori that describes this as well, complete with references, the article is a bit old, but still correct. Continue reading "Type 1 versus Type 2 Hypervisors" »

Freescale on Multi-core and Virtualization

Two good blog posts from some of my colleagues at Freescale. One on Heading Into Hyperspace: Hypervisor and Multi-core design  by Jim Trudeau and one by Rob Oshana on the Top 3 Keys to Multi-core software development. Jim talks about the multi-core aspects mostly from Freescale's P4080 perspective, an elegant, powerful and very popular processor in the networking space. The P4080 has not only many processors, it is truly designed for multicore with multiple peripherals (multiple PCI hosts) and multiple memory controllers for example to reduce contention.

Continue reading "Freescale on Multi-core and Virtualization" »

Freescale on Multi-core and Virtualization

Two good blog posts from some of my colleagues at Freescale. One on Heading Into Hyperspace: Hypervisor and Multi-core design by Jim Trudeau and one by Rob Oshana on the Top 3 Keys to Multi-core software development. Jim talks about the multi-core aspects mostly from Freescale's P4080 perspective, an elegant, powerful and very popular processor in the networking space. The P4080 has not only many processors, it is truly designed for multicore with multiple peripherals (multiple PCI hosts) and multiple memory controllers for example to reduce contention.

Continue reading "Freescale on Multi-core and Virtualization" »

Primary Virtualization Use Case

This topic invariably comes up when talking to customers, unfortunately, there is not just one, but several primary use cases. There are multiple ways to look into the various use cases. The one I like best is to look at generic drivers. An alternative is to look at actual usages in the various industries. Continue reading "Primary Virtualization Use Case" »

Bill-Of-Material

Bill-of-material is something that is important in many devices and I have argued before that virtualization can help with this. Say you have a medical device like an MRI scanner, it is not uncommon that this device has three processors that collaborate. One processor, often in a separate box like an industrial PC, runs MS Windows and is the operator interface, possibly with touch-screen GUI. This is where the results are displayed. Continue reading "Bill-Of-Material" »

Been to a hospital lately?

Well, I surely hope you haven't, hospitals are not my favorite places, they are a fertile ground for embedded systems though. Many of the devices in the hospital consist of an instrument part and a user interface (Human Machine Interface). The device could be an MRI scanner, or a a relatively simple blood analyzer. The Human Machine Interface on these devices control the instrument(s) provide feedback on the measurements and possibly interacts with a back office system.

Continue reading "Been to a hospital lately?" »

What a month!

I have been back in Ottawa now for just over a week after my 5 week trip through Europe and am working through my notes from the past month. And what a month it has been, in an earlier post I jokingly declared 2010 the year of embedded virtualization and this is certainly ringing true.

Continue reading "What a month!" »

Leaders and Followers

Events such as ESC in San Jose this week are a great way to talk to a lot of customers in a very short timespan. Hence, a great place to be for a product manager like myself. The conversations show a clear difference between leaders in multicore adoption and followers of that adoption.

Continue reading "Leaders and Followers" »

So, what does _your_ software architecture look like?

Customers often ask me in my opinion as to what their path to multi-core should be. Invariably I ask them two things. 1) Describe your current hardware architecture, your next hardware architecture and what your hardware architecture will look like in 3 years; 2) Describe your current software architecture and any plans you have to evolve it.

This leads to interesting discussions, most customers can draw their hardware architectures, some can white board their software architectures easily, some have more problems, but I have a strong feeling that their drawing differs significantly from the actual implementation.

Continue reading "So, what does _your_ software architecture look like?" »