Wind River (www.windriver.com) announced February 22 enhancements to its VxWorks safety solutions, including safe and secure partitioning via the upcoming version of Wind River Hypervisor, the company’s high-performance embedded hypervisor. The addition of safe and secure partitioning will enable workload consolidation of safety-certified applications alongside Linux and Windows applications on single- and multi-core processors.
Increased safety and security regulations result in more embedded devices being subject to rigorous and expensive certification processes to comply with standards such as IEC 61508 for industrial systems, CENELEC EN 50128 for transportation systems, and ISO 26262 ASIL-D for automotive applications. The safe and secure partitioning capability is designed and implemented for safety certification and decoupling the lifecycle of certified and non-certified applications. This provides the option for increased innovation of the non-certified applications and reduces ongoing system certification costs while enabling the benefits of consolidation such as reduced device size, weight and power consumption.
“Safe and secure partitioning will extend Wind River’s heritage in certified systems and will enable many valuable usage scenarios across regulated industries like energy, automation, transportation, medical and automotive market segments,” said Cory Bialowas, vice president of embedded virtualization product management at Wind River. “For example, industrial companies will be able to leverage existing certified software while innovating with enhanced applications based on Linux and Windows.”
In addition to its safety-certifiable features, the upcoming release of Wind River Hypervisor will provide high-performance device sharing, including shared access to 3D accelerated graphics among multiple guest operating systems. This will allow for innovative in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems that implement “sandboxing” techniques; for example, a Linux-based GENIVI-compliant partition, such as Wind River Platform for Infotainment, could share the IVI display with an open Linux partition, allowing the vehicle owner to download content and applications without subjecting this content to rigorous safety testing. Additionally, real-time driver-assist capabilities or vehicle bus interfaces could coexist with the Linux partitions, providing further opportunity to both innovate and reduce the hardware costs of the IVI system.
Wind River Hypervisor 2.0 is expected to be available the summer of 2012.
