Open Kernel Products
Aerospace and Defense
For decades, computer-based aerospace and defense (A&D) systems have been custom-built to meet the stringent needs of military, civilian aviation, satellite and space exploration. Starting in the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Defense and other American and international agencies began a push for COTS (Commercial Off-the-Shelf) procurement to leverage advances in commercial information technology. The latest stage in the move to COTS procurement has especially impacted the software side of procurement, development and deployment, with migration from proprietary RTOSes and legacy UNIX to systems based on Linux and other open source software.
This move to COTS open source software has also created a series of new challenges and for A&D systems developers especially the need to separate trusted and untrusted application and systems code. To meet this new set of requirements, Open Kernel Labs offers the OKL4 platform with:
- Superior security and robustness from hardware-enforced virtual machines or partitions
- Security architecture for specification and enforcement of mandatory access control policies
- Hardware support for 32- and 64-bit general purpose processors, NPUs, SoCs, FPGAs and application processors
- Transparent and scalable utilization of multiple processor cores on a blade and blades in a rack or cluster
- Short path for retargeting legacy RTOS and UNIX code to next-generation hardware and software platforms
- User space non-privileged execution of all guest OSes and other software
- Small source code base of Open Kernel Labs hypervisor to enable certification
- Rapid restart of guest OSes and applications for fast failover of critical communications code
- Robust, secure and high performance communication among guest operating systems and applications
- Isolation of open source code and mission critical and/or classified code to meet contractual obligations and regulatory requirements
- Platform for building and deploying MLS-compliant systems