VOSySofficial
Virtual Open Systems: automotive mixed-critical virtualization done right
Goal
The VOSySmonitor hypervisor enables safety-critical virtualization in all types of vehicle, providing a solution that maximizes performance, security, scalability and openness. VOSySmonitor meets ISO 26262 requirements and has been certified ASIL C.
Challenge
Vehicle software complexity is increasing exponentially, with a strong demand for solutions to optimize resource utilization, ease development/maintenance of new features, to enable secure over-the-air updates. In addition, pervasive connectivity and user device interactions increases vulnerabilities on the vehicle attack surface. Hackers have already demonstrated their ability to exploit such vulnerabilities by taking control of the vehicle and accessing personal user data. For this reason, security and isolation of safety-critical applications are key challenges to be addressed in modern automotive solutions.
Finally, the industry has seen Tier-1 and OEM innovation capability limited by software stacks created within closed software ecosystems with expensive license fees and technical limitations due to legacy architectures. In this context, Tier-1 and OEM risk a technology and business lock-in which prevent them to optimize system architecture, scalability, overall system costs.
Solution
VOSySmonitor is an ISO 26262 ASIL C certified safety-critical hypervisor built on Arm TrustZone that enables the concurrent execution of multiple operating systems with different levels of criticality. The innovative VOSySmonitor architecture splits the system in two main compartments, one for the safety critical and the other for standard applications, isolating them with the use of Arm’s security solution.
Such cyber-physical isolation is of pivotal importance to provide security, with safety critical applications running fully protected (in a separate memory address space, tagged caches and isolated devices) from the standard applications. Moreover, VOSySmonitor is positioned in the lowest level of the vehicle software stack (Arm monitor layer), providing strongest control on the system resources partitioning and highest flexibility. In fact, VOSySmonitor does not impose any closed solution (e.g., RTOS, AUTOSAR system, etc.) and is fully compliant with open source technologies like XEN, KVM, Linux, Android, Automotive Grade Linux, etc.
Benefits
- Simplified virtual electronic control units: VOSySmonitor enables the execution of multiple operating systems on the same platform with no performance overhead, reducing hardware and wiring costs, easing software maintenance and prototyping.
- Highest security and safety: VOSySmonitor partitions the system resources isolating safety critical applications in a protected compartment. It is ISO 26262 ASIL C certified and supports security Trusted Execution Environment implementations like OPTEE.
- Scalability and openness: VOSySmonitor provides a scalable solution with increasing complexity from simple use cases (for instance Linux running with an RTOS) to ADAS applications with a high number of operating systems working together. VOSySmonitor’s ecosystem is fully open and supports open source hypervisors for non safety-critical applications.
Automotive applications
- Consolidation of multiple functions in a single hardware platform (e.g., IVI and instrument cluster and BCM, eCockpit)
- Automotive emergency call, secure connectivity and telematics
- Autonomous driving applications with multiple safety-critical and non safety critical workloads
Why Arm
VOSYSmonitor is based on Arm TrustZone technology, which enforces among others, memory, CPU and interrupt isolation between the RTOS and the GPOS. These characteristics help to provide security isolation, upon which co-execution of critical operations can be implemented, while based on a secure TrustZone foundation.
VOSYSmonitor has been specifically designed to ensure highest security leveraging on Arm TrustZone. By implementing virtualization at the TrustZone level, Virtual Open Systems not only offers the highest security available, but also lets customers freely use virtualization extensions in automotive applications (e.g., using open source hypervisors like XEN). This is the key to VOSYSmonitor innovation.
What’s next?
- Virtual Open Systems is leading the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) Virtualization Expert Group. The company is working with Arm in this domain to enable open source virtualization in AGL.
- VOSYSmonitor is also a good fit for IoT, healthcare and industry 4.0 use cases.
For more information on Virtual Open Systems:
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About Virtual Open Systems:
Virtual Open Systems is a high-tech software company providing open virtualization solutions and custom services in complex mixed-criticality systems for Automotive, connected vehicles, IoT Edge, and more in general for embedded systems. Virtual Open Systems has been one of the first company to port KVM on Arm, paving the way to a whole new set of use cases in the context of open source virtualization for embedded systems. It has initiated and leads the Automotive Grade Linux Virtualization Expert Group (EG-Virt), which foster the usage of virtualization in automotive electronic components. Based on its core product VOSySmonitor, Virtual Open Systems addresses various vertical market segments which require virtualization technologies to address mixed-criticality requirements, such as in automotive, industrial, IoT, energy power-breakers, drones, etc.
