Advanced partitioning aids safety-critical system design

21st November 2014

Barney Scott

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Wind River has introduced a safety profile for the next-gen version of its VxWorks RTOS. The profile adds safety features to VxWorks 7, aimed at the development of safety critical systems in industrial, medical, transportation, aerospace and defense applications. Wind River has enhanced its Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks.

The Safety Profile for VxWorks delivers advanced time and space partitioning capabilities to ensure reliable, interference-free consolidation of multiple applications with different levels of safety criticality on one hardware platform, single or multi-core. Consolidation helps customers meet stringent safety requirements with a variety of system design options while driving down BOM and maintenance costs. Separation of applications of different criticality levels allows customers to update specific applications in a targeted fashion, without having to retest or recertify the entire system.

The profile has received pre-approval by TÜV SÜD for IEC 61508-3 SIL3 conformance, and optionally features a certification evidence package. Wind River expects Safety Profile to serve as the future foundation that will help customers certify their devices to additional IEC standards.

Separately, the recently launched Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks provides support for device virtualisation through the open VirtIO standard. Device virtualisation further reduces the mechanical footprint and cost base of consolidated systems, and lowers the barrier to virtualisation in the embedded domain, while the use of the VirtIO standard allows any operating system to use the virtualised devices.

The VxWorks RTOS boasts a modular, scalable architecture that separates the VxWorks core from middleware, applications, and other packages, enabling bug fixes, upgrades, and feature additions to be accomplished faster.

“With Safety Profile for VxWorks, developers can take full advantage of technological advances in MPUs that VxWorks enables, with the confidence that they will have a strong OS foundation to meet the most demanding safety certification standards,” said Dinyar Dastoor, Vice President, Product Management, Wind River. “For over three decades Wind River has been a trusted technology partner to companies in markets where safety and reliability are paramount, and this is just another proof point of our commitment to providing robust safety features across our product portfolio.”

Wind River will be showcasing the latest features and capabilities of VxWorks 7 at SPS IPC Drives in Nuremberg, Germany, 25^th to 27^th November, Hall 6, Booth 305.