Virtual Open Systems Newsletter

Enhancing mixed-critical product and service software solutions in automotive, networking, energy, IoT

Research: H2020 EVEREST project - Distributed High Perf Computation

A new granted Horizon 2020 (H2020) innovation project about extreme-scale & distributed computing on accelerated platforms will start. The project, funded by the European Commission, is called dEsign enVironmEnt foR Extreme-Scale big data analytics on heterogeneous platforms (EVEREST) will see the cooperation of ten European excellences in the research and industry fields. Virtual Open Systems plays a key role in the project, leading the design and development of a cross platform (Arm, RISC-V and x86) virtualization framework for hardware accelerators.

ApplePies conference: Paper on x86 System Management Mode

The Virtual Open Systems product activity related to mixed critical virtualization on x86 systems is progressing with new benchmarks performed on the Intel MinnowBoard Turbot. The results of this work have been published in a new scientific paper that has been submitted to the Applications in Electronics Pervading Industry, Environment and Society (ApplePies) 2020 conference. The title of the paper is "x86 System Management Mode (SMM) evaluation for Mixed Critical Systems"; it describes EFI Development Kit 2 (EDK2) SMM extensions, specifically developed by Virtual Open Systems to benchmark the SMM context switch and demonstrate the feasibility of the new VOSySmonitorX86 company product.

Innovation: H2020 DIGIFED - ENOCH application project granted

ENergica cOnneCtivity Hub (ENOCH) is a 12 months granted H2020 DIGIFED application project that will be developed in Q4 2020 by Virtual Open Systems together with a well known electrical motorcycles company. The target of this project is to build a smart connectivity hub for electric motorbikes that will be able to efficiently provide both connectivity and safety through virtualization. Virtual Open Systems will contribute to the project by developing a custom version of its VOSySmonitor product, specifically designed for the STM32-MP1 microcontroller. Such new version of VOSySmonitor is targetted to be the first solution that brings efficient virtualization in low power systems.

Product design-win: VOSySmonitor in L3 autonomous driving prototype

The Arm version of VOSySmonitor has been recently selected for the development of an L3 autonomous driving prototype by a Tier 2 company. More in detail, VOSySmonitor will be used to istantiate and control two execution environments on the target platform where both Linux (for connectivity) and a real time operating system (for safety critical workload) will be executed concurrently and in a secure way. VOSySmonitor was preferred to other virtualization solutions because of both its lightweight implementation (simplifying iso26262 certification) and strong isolation, a key requirement to guarantee safety and security challenges.

Development services: Activities in automotive, networking and energy

Virtual Open Systems offers top class virtualization design and development services since january 2011. Recently, four new projects, requesting for specific/rare competences and innovative solutions in embedded and multicore heterogeneous systems, have been commissioned to Virtual Opern Systems. One of them is related to automotive virtualization, where VOSySmonitor is ported to the an NXP iMX8 platform; a second one is related, in the automotive domain, to the implementation of virtualization extensions for a multicore AUTOSAR real time operating system. Another project involves activities in the networking field to develop routers BSP extensions for the execution of network services in virtualized environments. Moreover, the is proceeding with a production target.

Product development: VOSySmonitoRV to boost RISC-V architecture

The Virtual Open Systems product activity to enable the mixed criticality secure isolation of VOSySmonitor also on RISC-V architecture is showing an increasingly interest from customers and partners from all over the world. VOSySmonitoRV is in fact a very innovative solution in the RISC-V low level software scenario, both as virtualization solution for devices that are not equipped with an Memory Management Unit and as well as a mixed criticality solution to protect real time services from standard applications. The development activity is well in progress, and the first prototype of the product is expected for Q4 2020.

Further information and Contact