Complexities are what mark the embedded software development arena and with the changing market, these complexities keep on increasing. This coupled with the demand for reliability, mounts pressure on embedded software developers to come up with products that are faster, smaller and smarter than the earlier ones. Hence, in order to meet these specific and unique requirements, the embedded software development team utilizes all the available technology. One such technology that makes embedded software development less challenging is Cross OS Hypervisor. In embedded development, the developers face many issues that tremendously affect their project schedule. Some of the reasons that affect the development time and schedule are: • Upgrading to a new tools version • New software features • Moving to a new tool chain • Changing specifications • Changing out hardware • Changing or upgrading the embedded OS • Changing drivers • Adding new output devices to the application • Adding more memory to the system • Adding a new device If vendors, for instance, fail to supply required hardware or supporting certain operating systems or versions, it can make the embedded software obsolete. In such circumstances, the only solace for the embedded developers is hypervisor as it “allows multiple operating systems to share a single hardware host.” Though hypervisor solutions help the embedded developers to extend the life of obsolete embedded systems, it brings in more problems in the form of integration and communication issues. The solution for this is cross OS hypervisor. This next generation cross platform hypervisor management solution goes one-step further by eliminating the need for multiple operating systems. In other words, it allows various applications developed for multiple operating systems to be consolidated on a single OS platform without manual porting effort. Besides, as the needs arise, it facilitates the easy movement of the various applications to different operating system platforms. With the next generation hypervisor, applications can allow sharing of certain individual resources (tasks, timers, queues, etc) and directly communicate between them using the virtualization interfaces’ shared block memory manager. This mechanism allows applications to communicate directly and bypass the hardware devices or network interface layers, as well be tested and integrated under a host environment. Applications can take full advantage of powerful resources like CPU, memory, drivers, middleware and tools on the host platform and start testing and integration before the actual target components are available. Thus, cross platform hypervisor management solution provides various virtualization interfaces that enable POSIX/Linux, micro-ITRON, Windows, VxWorks, Nucleus, ThreadX and pSOS embedded applications to run natively, consolidated on one host or target OS platform.
Related Articles -
embedded OS, cross platform hypervisor management,
|