Meeting Energy Industry Challenges with Open Source Solutions

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CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN WEBINAR

   Meeting Energy Industry Challenges 
   with Open Source Solutions   

The modern energy industry requires agility, flexibility, efficiency, and security. Listen as experts from Intel®, LF Energy, and Wind River® share how open source solutions can advance the global energy segment. View the entire session above, or pick and choose the sections you’re most interested in below.

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Wind River Linux

 

Why Wind River Linux

Wind River® Linux enables you to develop, deploy, and operate robust, reliable, and secure embedded solutions running on a purpose-built Linux operating system.

Avoid the risk and effort associated with roll-your-own (RYO) or unsupported silicon vendor Linux. Rely on Wind River to keep your code base up to date, track and fix defects, apply security patches, avoid technical debt, and customize your purpose-built Linux to adhere to strict market specifications and certifications. Wind River can also facilitate your IP and export compliance and significantly reduce your operational costs.

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Wind River Linux Overview

Purpose Built, Community-Based Linux with Long Term Commercial Support

Wind River Linux customizes the Linux OS for the specific requirements of your application. It includes an integrated artifact repository that is accessible to development and deployment teams alike, simplifying sharing and collaboration across the organization.

Wind River is a founding member, advisory board member, and the largest commercial software contributor to the Yocto Project, collectively investing more than 8,000 commits and 2.5M lines of code changes over the past four years. Wind River actively upstreams and contributes fixes and enhancements back into the project while building Yocto Project support into the next generation of the Wind River platform.

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Long Term Support

  • Maintenance that includes CVE monitoring and fixes
  • Daily testing and hardening to shrink the threat landscape
  • Support for a minimum of 10+ years for every Long Term Support (LTS) release
  • A variety of board support packages (BSPs) for a wide range of x86 and Arm hardware
  • An easily repeatable build process that is simplified with the Build System
  • Tracking of customizations to ensure transfer of knowledge even if teams change
  • Compliance where it counts – in the bill of materials (BOM), and in accordance with export regulations around the globe
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Multiple Paths for Development

Wind River offers the greatest flexibility by providing commercial releases in two delivery models: in source code as Long Term Support (LTS) and pre-built binaries.

Freely Available Commercial

Frequency

BASE release in sync with Yocto Project

LTS (Long Term Support) release, annual

Lifecycle

6–24 months, depending on the community

10+ years

Support

Community mailing lists

Standard, under Software License Agreement (SLA)


Additional options available

Maintenance

Community

Commercial, with predictable cadence

Benefits include:

  • Periodic new releases from both the community LTS kernel and Yocto Project LTS
  • BSP support based on vendor software development kit (SDK) updates
  • Support for real-time kernel when needed
  • Charge per project, with no additional fees regardless of how many devices are deployed over the life of the project (unlike some Linux distributions that charge for each deployed device)
ISO9001:2015 certification

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Wind River Linux Customer Success Stories

See how our customers are finding success with Wind River Linux and our award-winning support services.

Resources

DevOps with Simulation Can Solve Your Hardware Problem

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CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN WEBINAR

   DevOps with Simulation Can  
  Solve Your Hardware Problem   

If you develop software for devices and systems for the intelligent edge, you’re already sold on the idea that DevOps is a worthwhile endeavor, and you want to know how you can take your practice to the next level, you’re in the right place. See highlights below, or watch the whole webinar above.

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What Is a Hypervisor?

 

What Is a Hypervisor?

A hypervisor is software that uses virtualization technology to create, run, and manage virtual machines (VMs). Also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), a hypervisor keeps its operating system and resources isolated from the virtual machines it manages.

A key benefit of hypervisors is that multiple operating systems with very different characteristics can run at the same time, next to each other, and they can share the same virtualized hardware resources. Without this capability, only one operating system can be run on a computer hardware system.

hypervisor

A hypervisor allows developers to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on one hardware system.

Benefits of Hypervisors

Data Replication and Cloning

Cloning and replicating virtual machines is a difficult task. Using a hypervisor to clone or replicate a virtual machine is much easier and more cost-effective than using the original storage-based replication method, which requires replicating the full volume of all the virtual machines on the server and would require a huge amount of storage space.

Replication or cloning with a hypervisor is simple. You can choose the VMs and the components to be replicated, rather than all the VMs, which allows you to save storage space on the servers. Hardware-neutral hypervisor-based replication lets you take any data duplicates and move and store them easily in any storage device.

Consolidating Servers

Inbuilt graphical dashboards are components of hypervisors. Additional enhancements to inbuilt dashboards provide better visibility, which in turn provides the ability to centrally consolidate and manage servers. This can be accomplished even though the VMs can each be running different operating systems.

Industrial Control Automation Consolidation

With the use of a hypervisor and VMs, an industrial control automation system manufacturer can take previously separate computerized components of control automation system equipment and consolidate them on a single embedded system platform.

Test Environments

A hypervisor can create virtual systems that can test systems and applications as they are under development. This makes it easier to verify whether coding and system operations work properly.

Desktop Virtualization

With a hypervisor, a server can host a client’s or worker’s virtual desktop, which replicates the worker’s physical desktop and can be used over the internet.

Benefits of Hypervisors

An embedded hypervisor is designed to support embedded systems needs and requirements. It is usually a Type 1 hypervisor that is targeted to support the virtual requirements of embedded systems within a device, not IT servers or desktop computers. An embedded hypervisor’s overall software coding size is small and provides real-time or fast hypervisor capabilities with support for multiple isolated VMs in an embedded system device.

Due to its size and requirements, an embedded hypervisor is designed to minimally affect the system resources on the device and to support real-time latency. This type of hypervisor can implement scheduling policies between the different virtual machines and deliver support to the components of a real-time system for an embedded device.

Classification Types of Hypervisors

Type 1 Hypervisor (Bare Metal) Type 2 Hypervisor (Hosted)
A Type 1 hypervisor, which is also called a bare metal hypervisor, directly operates on the host system’s hardware to create VMs and manage the guest operating systems used in each VM. It replaces the host operating system, and the resources for each VM are directly scheduled by the hypervisor to the hardware. In most cases, an embedded hypervisor is a Type 1 hypervisor. KVM is a hypervisor that is merged into the Linux kernel of modern versions of Linux. A Type 2 hypervisor operates as a software layer or application on a conventional operating system. Type 2 hypervisors are also called hosted hypervisors. This type of hypervisor works by extracting guest operating systems from the host operating system. The resources of these VMs are scheduled to the host operating system. Then they are performed against the hardware in the host system.

Type 1 vs. Type 2 Hypervisors

The simple difference between a Type 1 and a Type 2 hypervisor is that a Type 1 hypervisor (bare metal hypervisor) directly operates on the host system’s hardware, and a Type 2 runs as a software layer or application on top of a conventional operating system. Most embedded hypervisors are Type 1.

Embedded Hypervisors

Hardware Requirements

Embedded systems use a wide range of processor architecture types. The selected embedded hypervisor, usually Type 1, needs to work with the processor used in the embedded system or device.

Given the design of embedded systems, most have strict resource usage limits on the processor, particularly in the use of power and computer memory. An embedded hypervisor must operate within those limits. Additionally, the hypervisor must communicate rapidly, with low latency, within all components of the system. Embedded hypervisors based on a real-time OS help provide this fast communication.

Resource Requirements

The cost and technical limits of embedded system hardware require efficient use by the embedded hypervisor. With these limitations and requirements, embedded hypervisors most often maintain a small memory footprint, from several tens to several hundred kilobytes. The size depends on the efficient level of implementation and the functionality level provided.

Use Cases

As the Internet of Things grows and intelligent edge systems become more prevalent, the use cases for embedded hypervisors are expanding. Use cases include system hardware simplification, vehicle diagnostics, sensor input and actuator output for industrial environments, and support for multiple operating systems.

hypervisor interoperation

An embedded hypervisor must operate within the usage limits of the processor, while communicating rapidly with all components of the system.

How Hardware Virtualization and Embedded Hypervisors Work

The computer hardware that is used as a hypervisor is known as the host, and all the virtual machines that are created and used as its resources are called guests. Server systems within IT systems have used hypervisors as well as desktop systems. As hypervisors have become more popular, they have been used in embedded platforms and systems.

The hypervisor takes the CPU, memory, and storage as pooled resources and allows them to be reallocated across the various existing guests or allocates them to the created VMs.

To run these created VMs, hypervisors need to utilize various OS-level mechanisms, such as a memory manager, process scheduler, input/output (I/O) sources, and more.

The hypervisor allocates resources to each VM and manages and schedules VM resources against the physical computer resources of the system. The actual computer hardware performs the execution (e.g., the CPU executing instructions requested by the VMs), while the hypervisor manages all the scheduling.

How Can Wind River Help?

Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform

Wind River Helix™ Virtualization Platform leverages a Type 1 hypervisor to consolidate multi-OS and mixed-criticality applications onto a single edge compute software platform, simplifying, securing, and future proofing designs. By creating and managing virtual machines, safety-partitioning capabilities can separate safety-critical applications from general-purpose applications, allowing easy implementation of your new and legacy systems.

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Helix Virtualization Platform

Figure 1. Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform architecture

Hypervisor FAQs

What is a hypervisor, and what does it do?

A hypervisor, also known as a virtual machine monitor (VMM), is a software layer that allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical machine. It manages the allocation of resources such as memory, CPU, and storage between the VMs and provides a layer of isolation between them.

What are the different types of hypervisors?

There are two main types of hypervisors: Type 1 (or bare metal) hypervisors, which run directly on the hardware; and Type 2 (or hosted) hypervisors, which run on top of a host operating system.

What are the benefits of using a hypervisor?

Using a hypervisor allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical machine, which can lead to better resource utilization, reduced hardware costs, and increased flexibility in managing and deploying software.

What are some common use cases for hypervisors?

Hypervisors are commonly used in server consolidation, cloud computing, software development and testing, and security and isolation.

How does a hypervisor provide isolation between virtual machines?

A hypervisor provides isolation between virtual machines (VMs) by ensuring that each VM runs in its own virtualized environment with its own set of resources. This prevents one VM from accessing or affecting the resources of another VM.

What are some common hypervisor features?

Common hypervisor features include live migration, snapshotting, resource allocation, and network and storage virtualization.

How does live migration work in a hypervisor?

Live migration allows a running virtual machine (VM) to be moved from one physical machine to another without interruption. This is accomplished by transferring the VM’s state and memory contents to the new machine while it is still running.

What is a snapshot, and how is it used in a hypervisor?

A snapshot is a point-in-time copy of a virtual machine (VM) state and configuration. It is used to create a backup of the VM or to enable easy rollback to a previous state in case of errors or issues.

What are some common hypervisor security features?

Common hypervisor security features include virtual machine encryption, secure boot, secure firmware update, and access control.

What are some popular hypervisor products?

Some popular hypervisor products include VMware ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, and Oracle VirtualBox.

Omron Customer Success Story

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Companies like Omron, that are driving the digital transformation in manufacturing, rely on Wind River for both the technology and the expertise to turn intelligent IoT concepts into reality.

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