February 06, 2008
CTO Gernot Heiser’s “Virtualization - What Can it Do for You?” Featured in IQ Magazine
I.Q. Information Quarterly Volume 6, Virtualization - What Can it Do for You?
Author: Gernot Heiser, Chief Technology Officer, Open Kernel Labs
Virtualization has been a hot topic in the enterprise space for a while, but has recently become an important technology for embedded systems as well. Virtualization offers embedded systems developers many attractive properties, such as the ability to run different operating systems concurrently on the same processor, the isolation of subsystems and strict partitioning of resources – all important to building secure, feature-rich embedded systems.
This article provides an introduction to virtualization technology and discusses its use in embedded systems. It covers the inherent differences between the enterprise-systems style of virtualization and virtualization as it applies to embedded systems. The limitations of straight virtualization approaches in this space are discussed, and we provide a glimpse of generalized operating systems technology which overcomes those limitations.
Posted by Gernot Heiser on February 06 at 09:52 AM
About Gernot Heiser:
Gernot Heiser, Chief Technology Officer, never thought he would be in the business world. Prior to NICTA's creation in 2003, Dr Heiser was a full-time faculty member at the University of New South Wales. However, this die-hard academic couldn’t pass up the opportunity to see the commercialization of this research. Gernot still loves teaching, almost as much as he loves good wine and good food. And anyone will tell you that Gernot knows his wine.