No Downtime Upgrade

I have had multiple conversations on software upgrade with a number of
customers and wanted to share this particular usage scenario of
virtualization technology. Software upgrade traditionally requires

  1. Delivery of new software to the embedded system
  2. Shutdown of service
  3. Shutdown of the system
  4. Installation of the new binaries
  5. Reboot of the system
  6. Restoration of service

Between 2 and 6 of course the system is ‘down’, no service is provided, which is a bad state for many embedded systems.

Virtualization
allows the user to run two virtual boards, on a single processor if
needed. Only one of these virtual boards is actively in service, the
other is dormant, it takes some memory space, but not processor time.

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