Wind River Hypervisor release

Yesterday Wind River Systems released the hypervisor they announced last summer, complete with YouTube videos:

• Release announcement
• Mark Hermeling's blog entry
  
• LinuxDevices coverage
• EETimes coverage

Things I find interesting:

• From the demo video, we can see that the x86 port uses VT, but the PowerPC core doesn't have equivalent functionality (e500v2 is pre-ISA 2.06). That must mean they've got a paravirtual interface, likely the "virtual board interface" mentioned.
• EETimes quote: "We map I/O into the guest environment directly so it can directly talk to data registers to get higher performance." Given that they're releasing VxWorks MILS Platform 2.0 today for the hypervisor, which presumably requires high levels of isolation, I'm willing to bet that direct IO access is an option rather than a design assumption.
  
• Mark's demo videos had an emphasis on their Workbench IDE. I don't know if this was a conscious decision or not, but it does nicely reinforce the notion of the hypervisor as part of a solution, not a standalone product.
• They advertise their "MIPC" shared-memory inter-guest communication mechansim. I hope they just put a fancy name on virtio, but I doubt it. If they aren't using virtio, they're developing yet another set of virtual IO drivers for Linux. :(
• Their Linux patch isn't mentioned, but I hope they will be publishing it and merging it upstream, instead of the usual RTOS vendor approach to Linux...
• They consistently advertise the performance impact as "2-3% at worst." That's a nice marketing bullet, but is never the right answer to a vague performance question. The right answer is "it depends." In this case, it depends on the processor model, the workload, the partitioning configuration, and more. For example, VT-enabled x86 virtualization will have very different performance characteristics than paravirtualized PowerPC.

All in all, it's a significant event when a dominant embedded software company enters a new area like virtualization. As time goes by, it will be interesting to see how well they play with competitors' software... who is going to port Integrity to the Wind River virtual board interface? ;)

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. ;)