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Portland, March 20, 2018: The Linux Foundation has released details of its open source projects, ACRN — a hypervisor designed for the Internet of Things (IoT). Pronounced “acorn”, it’s an open source reference hypervisor, built to meets the “unique needs of embedded IoT development.”
“With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” said Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of The Linux Foundation.
“ACRN’s optimisation for resource-constrained devices and focus on isolating safety-critical workloads and giving them priority make the project applicable across many IoT use cases. We’re pleased to welcome project ACRN and invite embedded developers to get involved in the new community.”
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ACRN is comprised of two main components: the hypervisor, and its device model complete with rich I/O mediators. ACRN will have a Linux-based Service OS and will run guest operating systems (another Linux instance, an RTOS, Android, or other operating systems) simultaneously, providing a powerful software platform to build complex computing systems. ACRN invites the embedded developer community to contribute code and plans to collaborate with the community to further the effort in providing a high quality open source embedded reference hypervisor.
Developers benefit from ACRN’s small, real time footprnt, which is flexible enough to accommodate different uses and provides consideration for safety-critical workloads. Consolidating a diverse set of IoT workloads with mixed-criticality on to a single platform helps reduce both development and deployment costs allowing for a more streamlined system architecture. An example of this is the electronic control unit (ECU) consolidation in automotive applications. While open source hypervisor options are available today, none share ACRN’s vision of an open source hypervisor solution optimized for embedded and IoT products.
“ACRN will have a Linux-based service OS and the ability to simultaneously run multiple types of guest operating systems providing a powerful solution for workload consolidation,” said Imad Sousou, corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Open Source Technology Center, at Intel Corporation. “This new project delivers a flexible, lightweight hypervisor, designed to take real-time and safety-critical concerns into consideration and drive meaningful innovation for the IoT space.”
Image Credit: Linux Foundation