Company: eSOL
Category: Embedded Solution Product of the Year
Developed in Europe by eSOL, a leading global specialist in embedded software systems, eMCOS® Hypervisor is a truly ground-breaking embedded virtualisation function which opens up even greater scalability for the company’s acclaimed eMCOS multikernel real-time operating system (RTOS).
Addressing the needs of design and development engineers in every embedded industry, eMCOS Hypervisor uniquely facilitates the integration of both robust real-time applications on RTOS and feature-rich applications on general-purpose OS – running concurrently on a single hardware platform.
The addition of eMCOS® Hypervisor to the eMCOS RTOS brings even greater flexibility in mixed-criticality system configuration, making it possible to incorporate general-purpose operating systems like Linux or Android without compromising real-time capabilities and safety.
As eMCOS Hypervisor is implemented by incorporating a virtualisation mechanism into eMCOS POSIX, users can enjoy scheduling features such as load balancing and time separation, on the same hardware platform as a guest OS. Full time and space isolation is provided for each mixed-criticality system.
A further major benefit is the ease of customisation relating to the boot sequence of a general-purpose OS. As guest operating systems are initiated as eMCOS POSIX processes, the boot sequence can be implemented simply as a process start and is easily customisable as sequential start-up and multi-core parallel start-up. The deployment of multiple guest operating systems is performed in a coordinated, optionally load-balanced manner, without impacting the determinism of real-time or safety functions.
Drivers can also be easily ported; Linux standard Virtio drivers are supported, making it easy to port Linux guests. In addition, drivers which are tightly coupled to the SoC can be ported simply and rapidly because the Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) can filter or bypass hardware accesses.
One of the important aspects of software development is reusability. eMCOS Hypervisor also implements support for common virtio device interfaces to allow Guest OS’s to access shared devices, making it possible to deploy a Linux image without other modifications than the integrator-level device-tree to specify both physical and virtual devices.
eMCOS Hypervisor is highly robust against malfunctions and malicious software (malware). The system is designed to minimise and optimise the virtualisation mechanism in the more privileged hypervisor and kernel space and perform most processing in the VMM placed in the user space. As a result, abnormalities in the guest OS and virtual machine do not cause the catastrophic failures that can lead to a system-wide crash.
eMCOS Hypervisor is ideal in applications requiring a high level of real-time capability, reliability, and safety, in particular the automotive, industrial, and medical sectors. However, recent times have seen system requirements increase with regard to scale and complexity. Examples include domain-controlled autonomous vehicles and connected cars, and support for smart factory functionality and the autonomous control of industrial robots. Capabilities such as integration and interoperation with other systems are becoming ever more important, even in applications which have traditionally placed a high priority on real-time functionality.
Linux and Android guest operating systems not only deliver the required POSIX-compliant API for simple existing code reuse but also support a high number of graphics display solutions and open communication protocols. This combination introduces better flexibility for implementing more advanced, open, and diverse mixed-criticality systems.
eMCOS Hypervisor also supports sharing the physical devices using ‘bridges’ running as POSIX real-time applications directly on the Hypervisor native environment, without the overhead of a Controlling Guest OS. These bridges can act as simple software-defined routers, but are also an ideal location to implement specific functionalities like encryption, an intrusion-detection-system, and/or rate limiting. If needed, physical devices can be directly passed to the Guest OS for best reuse of existing device drivers without sharing capability.
eMCOS Hypervisor by eSOL delivers unrivalled scalability, functionality, compatibility, speed and ease of use, which makes this product a worthy candidate for the Embedded Solution Product of the Year.