Wind River Drives IoT Device Development With Real-Time Virtualization Offering

Wind River Systems Inc., an Intel Corporation company, has announced an update to its real-time virtualization offering that allows customers to further reduce cost and innovate connected devices. The update includes storage virtualization capabilities, enhanced security capabilities, and expanded processor support.

Virtualization Profile for VxWorks is based on company’s virtualization technology and extends the scalability capabilities of VxWorks by integrating a real-time embedded, Type 1 hypervisor into the core of the real-time OS (RTOS). Through embedded virtualization, it allows VxWorks customers to consolidate multiple disparate workloads on a single processor. Critical in today’s era of IoT, it helps to address the need for robust, safer and more secure partitioning across all market segments.

“Virtualization is a key attribute in GE’s global vision for industrial control systems in the era of the Industrial Internet. It allows the GE businesses to combine their real-time control logic, HMI, security, and cloud connectivity into a single platform,” said Wes Skeffington, principal engineer, GE (General Electric Company). “Wind River’s virtualization offering provides the right attributes like scalability, storage virtualization, real-time behavior, VM isolation, and security capabilities to realize this vision.“

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Updates to Virtualization Profile for VxWorks include the following:

• Storage virtualization through VirtIO allows devices to share a single storage controller, even a single disk, such as a SATA device between multiple VMs, thereby dramatically reducing cost and complexity for consolidated systems. The run-time configuration, combined with support for the VirtIO device virtualization framework makes the virtualization profile a flexible and highly customizable virtualization layer for embedded devices.

• Enhanced security capabilities include integration with the Security Profile for VxWorks. These capabilities help customers to guard security from power-on all the way through VM load and beyond with secure boot, secure load, and data encryption during transmission and after shutdown.

• Expanded support for Atom and Celeron processors, providing even greater choices for customers to build product lines that scale from low end controllers to major gateways and high performance compute and display stations.

“Embedded virtualization allows customers to meet the challenges of the IoT era; it enables a future-proof architecture that can adapt and evolve to meet changing market requirements, customer needs, and technology advancements,” said Dinyar Dastoor, VP and GM, OS platforms, Wind River. “With these latest virtualization and security capability enhancements, Wind River has further strengthened VxWorks as the leading RTOS for IoT where connectivity, scalability and the ability to develop safer and more secure environments are paramount.“

The Virtualization Profile for VxWorks is an integral part of the Intel Industrial Solutions System Consolidation Series, a production-ready, virtualization software stack used for running an assortment of industrial and IoT workloads on a single platform.

Information about Virtualization Profile for VxWorks is available. And to learn more about how the company is addressing the opportunities and challenges of IoT.