Green Hills Software Adds Embedded RTOS Support for its Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor

“Many companies must deal with large amounts of legacy code when trying to develop the next-generation device for their unique market,” said Dan O’Dowd, founder and chief executive officer, Green Hills Software. “Our added virtualization support for VxWorks enables the freedom to implement uncompromised innovation, while being able to seamlessly support legacy code at the same time and on the same device.”

The broad commercialization and availability of multicore microprocessors for the embedded market now include special hardware supporting secure and trusted virtualization. As a result, many traditional uni-core/uni-operating system-based designs are migrating to a multicore/multi-operating system architecture. Whether developing future networking equipment with a design goal of reduced space and power, or upgrading an existing product design to keep backward compatibility with a prior VxWorks source base, Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor is the key to success. Initial development and demonstrations for this support target the Kontron Pentium-based embedded COM Express modules from their comprehensive portfolio of embedded multicore, virtualization-enabled platforms.

“Kontron is excited to see this truly seamless, secure approach to guest OS virtualization made available to the embedded market,” stated Marc Brown, chief operating officer, Kontron America. “With the use of the Green Hills Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor, our customers can now unleash the full power of our platform capabilities in their upcoming designs.”

Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor supports general purpose desktop and server operating systems such as Solaris, Red Hat Linux, BSD, and Windows. For embedded applications, Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor runs guest embedded operating systems such as INTEGRITY, VxWorks and Linux. Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor takes advantage of the latest hardware virtualization support, including Intel® vPro™ technology, to provide optimal virtualization performance without sacrificing security. At the same time, Padded Cell Secure Hypervisor allows independent and separate execution of the guest operating system and its associated applications running parallel with real-time, mission critical applications.