Wind River Linux 3.0 adds KVM

Wind River recently released Wind River Linux 3.0, including KVM support (on x86 systems of course).

Wind River is better known for their VxWorks embedded RTOS, which traditionally has been one of the dominant operating systems in the embedded industry, and still is today. After criticizing Linux and the GPL (as VxWorks competition) for years, in 2003 the company gave in and started moving towards Linux support, including its own Linux distribution. Today Wind River Linux is appearing in more and more places in the embedded Linux market. I think it's considered #2 after MontaVista, though I admit I don't know the relative market shares there.

In some ways, KVM support in Wind River Linux isn't a big surprise, because we already know that Wind River believes in embedded virtualization so much they're writing their own hypervisor.

In other ways, it is a surprise, because KVM is a hypervisor too, and as such might compete with their own hypervisor. I suppose they will have lots of internal conversations about market positioning and how to convince the world they're not competing with themselves, but I guess every sufficiently large company has the exact same issue.

Anyways, the one big takeaway from all this is that Wind River seems to be saying that KVM is good enough for embedded systems. Since I've been saying the same thing for a while to a sometimes-skeptical audience, I'll take it. ;)