Re-evaluating your virtualization options
In
the past few years hypervisor-based virtualization techniques have become
especially important as embedded systems designs have become more connected and
open to outside intrusion, involving the use of more than one processor and
often requiring the use of more than one operating system.
In many
consumer and mobile, networking and automotive applications, such techniques
allow developers to easily partition their code based between two operating
systems, one handling the low level real-time deterministic operations, the
other the higher level human interface and Internet access functions. This
separation also affords them some degree of security, allowing separation of
company proprietary code from other company or open source code, as well as make
it more difficult for malicious hackers to compromise the application. In
multicore designs, virtualization allows developers to continue to write code
using traditional sequential procedural methods rather than shift to new and
more difficult programming paradigms based on concurrency and parallelism.
As a result, the number and variety of both hardware and software-based
hypervisor-based VMMs have multiplied, as have the articles, white papers and
webinars to help you use them. Of these, some of the recent ones which are my Editor's Top Picks are Wednesday, April 25, 2012:
"Pick the right multicore virtualization use
case", by Rob Oshana and Stuart Yoder
Virtualization
Technology Under the Hood
Bringing Together Real-time and
Virtualization
As helpful as such information may be, much more
is needed says Markus Levy, president of the Multicore
Association in "Managing the coming explosion of embedded multicore
virtualization". In this article he argues for an industry-wide
effort to come up with a more coherent and flexible set of standardized
mechanisms for deploying virtualization in embedded designs.
He is
asking for participation in a newly formed working group chaired by Rajan Goyal
of Cavium Networks and Surender Kumar of Nokia Siemens Networks. Its aim is to
develop a framework for managing the varied virtualization options. This is
important work, so contact him at markus.levy@multicore-association.org
or markus.levy@eembc.org if you want to participate
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