Software reuse enablement to reduce development time and cost

Software Reuse Enablement use case

The effort to reuse legacy embedded system software with new development targeting a different operating system (or version) is reduced using OKL4s trustworthy virtualization capability.

Typically, as embedded systems products are updated over time, development teams choose to migrate to a newer version of their chosen device operating system. In some cases, the operating system may change completely from one generation of the product to the next. For example, the adoption of Linux for use in embedded systems has resulted in many products migrating from a proprietary embedded operating system to Linux with a new version of a product. When either of these scenarios occurs, a method must be found to reuse significant amounts of software that has already been developed, debugged, and validated with an older OS version or different OS. One approach is to port that software to the operating system chosen for the new project. The effort required to port and re-test existing software with a new operating system reduces the benefit of software reuse. The system virtualization capability provided by OKL4 enables legacy software to be reused in its original operating system environment while new software is developed for a new operating system. By providing a virtual machine for each required operating system or version, OKL4 reduces the effort to integrate legacy software with new software to create a new product release in less time and at lower cost.

When used to provide system virtualization, OKL4 offers the following benefits:

• Improved reliability and security because of the fact that each virtual machine has a separate address space and the fact that when run in an OKL4 VM, each guest operating system runs entirely at user level, and it is not privileged, as it would be on bare hardware.
• High levels of system performance can be achieved in this configuration, largely because of OKL4’s high performance inter process communication (IPC).
• In addition to supporting one or more virtual machines running operating systems and their applications, OKL4 provides lightweight execution environments that offer critical programs a minimal trusted computing base, allowing further improvements in reliability and security.
• Design flexibility and reliability is also increased by OKL4’s flexible device handling infrastructure, which allows devices to be shared by multiple virtual machines and to reside either within an operating system environment or in an isolated and protected domain of their own.

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