SYSGO and AMD form cooperative venture for virtualization in embedded market

SYSGO and AMD have formed a cooperative venture to exploit AMD multi-core technology in conjunction with SYSGO's PikeOS paravirtualization real-time operating system.

The first result of this partnership demonstrates the cooperative execution of Windows Embedded XP and a real-time application in clearly separated partitions. Virtualization is a powerful technique that enables hardware convergence efforts, legacy code reuse, IP protection, and security and safety solutions. Both AMD and SYSGO provide broad support for these market issues, using different but complementary virtualization approaches. PikeOS is a unique combination of a complete real-time operating system that's based on a separation microkernel, and a hypervisor with all its virtualization capabilities. Within PikeOS, the separation microkernel manages the partitioning of the user space, and therefore enables virtualization.

With AMD-V virtualization technology, some of the separation work runs in hardware. These features will enable PikeOS to become even more efficient, by avoiding the execution of some rather complex algorithms. The very compact implementation of PikeOS will be reduced even further when using AMD-V, and overall performance will definitely be improved. The SYSGO/AMD joint solution will be able to handle running real-time applications cooperatively with Linux and/or Microsoft Windows, running applications with different security and safety levels on one hardware, combining several electronic control units on one platform, running legacy code that's clearly separated from, but cooperates with, new technology, enabling several instances of Linux running on one machine. Aside from the technical advantages, the SYSGO/AMD solution helps to reduce and control implementation costs, as well as the overall embedded project risk.