Wind River Extends Virtualization Support With New Release of Wind River Hypervisor

Wind River today released an updated version of Wind River Hypervisor, its embedded virtualization solution for single and multicore processors. The new Wind River Hypervisor 1.1 release supports the latest Intel® processors and enables new inter-virtual machine communication capabilities. Additionally, debugging of virtual boards is now supported by the latest version of Wind River On-Chip Debugging.

Wind River Hypervisor makes it easier for customers to consolidate systems and adopt virtualization and multicore technology in embedded devices. New features of Wind River Hypervisor include:

• Support for the latest Intel® microarchitecture codename Nehalem-based processors, such as the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series as well as Intel® Core ™ i5 processor and Intel® Core ™ i7 processor utilizing advanced virtualization hardware assist capabilities.
• Integration with Wind River’s industry leading operating systems, including the latest versions of VxWorks and Wind River Linux, while also supporting other operating systems for greater flexibility.
• Additional capabilities for inter-virtual machine communication, including support for MIPC (multicore/multi-OS interprocess communication), and virtual network and serial ports.
• When used in conjunction with recently released Wind River On-Chip Debugging 3.2, optimized for development of multicore, multi-OS and virtualized environments, developers can debug the most complex system-level issues such as race conditions, memory corruption and core synchronization.

Wind River plans to broaden processor support for existing processor architectures, along with introducing additional processor architectures, including Freescale QorIQ, to Wind River Hypervisor throughout this year.

“Wind River is mitigating the risk for embedded development teams migrating to multicore architectures. Our product portfolio supports multicore and virtualization using leading operating systems of today such as VxWorks and Wind River Linux, supported by Wind River Hypervisor,” said Tomas Evensen, chief technology officer, Wind River. “The breadth of Wind River’s portfolio mitigates customer risk by providing integrated solutions supporting a broad choice of operating system configurations (SMP/AMP/virtualized). This allows customers to focus on perfecting their software architecture and creating innovative and differentiated devices.”

Multicore and virtualization are changing the way the embedded device market develops next-generation devices by providing more processing power, while lowering energy consumption, which can lead to a dramatic reduction in bill-of-material cost. First launched in June 2009, Wind River Hypervisor allows device software developers to take advantage of multicore and virtualization to configure unicore and multicore processors quickly and easily, thereby decreasing time-to-market for next-generation devices.

“Embedded engineering teams, across industries such as manufacturing, transportation, telecommunications and consumer devices, are increasingly looking towards virtualization as a critical development solution. Virtualization, combined with multicore-based architectures, creates a unified processing entity for space- and cost-constrained devices,” said Dirk Finstel, chief technology officer, Kontron. “For developers looking to build differentiated systems featuring multiple operating systems or multicore processors, Wind River Hypervisor is the type of flexible, easily configurable and adaptable solution developers need today. Kontron will continue to leverage its strategic relationship with Wind River to help the developer community build and bring devices to market quickly and gain a competitive edge.”

Wind River Hypervisor is a type 1 embedded hypervisor featuring a small footprint, minimal latency for device access, plus deterministic capabilities and optimizations for maximum performance. Wind River Hypervisor supports a variety of different processor architectures, taking advantage of hardware virtualization support when applicable. Embedded developers are utilizing hypervisors to enable the replacement of multiple boards or CPUs with a single board and/or a single CPU, create innovative new devices that leverage multiple operating systems and reduce complexity and hence risk when integrating multicore processors. For more information, please visit http://www.windriver.com/products/hypervisor/.

About Wind River

Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC), is a world leader in embedded and mobile software. Wind River has been pioneering computing inside embedded devices since 1981 and its technology is found in more than 500 million products. Wind River is headquartered in Alameda, Calif. with offices in more than 15 countries. To learn more, visit Wind River at www.windriver.com or blogs.windriver.com.