Wind River broadens embedded virtualization support to Freescale QorIQ and Intel Xeon 5600

ALAMEDA, USA: Wind River has introduced a new version of Wind River Hypervisor, a real-time, embedded hypervisor for virtualization, which adds support for Freescale QorIQ P2 and P4 platform series and Intel Xeon processor 5600 series. Wind River plans to further broaden its hardware support for Wind River Hypervisor with multi-core ARM in 2011.

Wind River Hypervisor, together with the latest versions of Wind River’s operating systems and development tools, represents the breadth and depth of the company’s multi-core software portfolio that combines multi-core-aware operating systems, tools, and embedded virtualization that scales from unicore to high-core count multi-core processors. Wind River Hypervisor is highly optimized for and integrated with the latest versions of VxWorks, Wind River Linux, Wind River Workbench and Wind River Test Management.

“Adoption of multi-core and embedded virtualization offers opportunities to leverage existing software in the form of legacy, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) and open source as well as improve the reliability of systems,” said Mark Hermeling, product line manager for embedded virtualization at Wind River.

“We’re seeing a notable increase in virtualization demand across many of our key embedded market segments. To address this demand, we’re advancing the technology and growing industry support of Wind River Hypervisor through our strong ties within the embedded ecosystem and plan to accelerate our pace of innovation even further.”

New features and benefits of the latest Wind River Hypervisor include the following:

* Support for Freescale’s e500mc core and the QorIQ P4080 processor; virtualization hardware assist offered by the processor core, the multiple memory busses as well as the Data Path Acceleration Architecture.

* The ability to run unmodified guest operating systems on e500mc and Intel processors, which reduces the cost for consolidation of existing systems.

* A flexible device management layer, which offers fine-grained tuning of device access and sharing, thereby delivering flexibility with maximum performance.

* Built-in capabilities for software upgrades, allowing customers to easily update the operating systems running inside virtual machines.

Wind River Hypervisor focuses on core real-time and embedded values such as high performance, small footprint, determinism, low latency and high reliability and can deliver these values on a wide variety of popular embedded hardware architectures, thereby offering scalability from very small and power-efficient processors used in industrial and consumer electronics devices to the high core-count processors used in the large switches powering today’s telecom networks.

Companies are increasingly looking to leverage the power of multi-core processors and embedded virtualization, yet they often struggle with the first step in implementing multi-core into their product lines.

Wind River Professional Services has consolidated years of knowledge and experience assisting customers with multi-core architecture decisions and implementation and created the Wind River Multi-Core Adoption Package. This services offering provides customers with a reliable path to multi-core and includes two consultative elements, the Multi-core Platform Architecture Study and Multi-core Platform Implementation Services.