Open Kernel Products
Automotive/Transportation
Automotive and other transportation manufacturers are today investing in hardware and software technologies to make vehicles “smarter” and more efficient to produce and maintain.
Vehicle intelligence focuses on controlling and monitoring mechanical and electrical subsystems and also on enhancing the experience of both drivers and passengers. Late model and next-generation vehicles offer buyers a range of smart dashboard-centric options for navigation, audio, video, voice and data networking, as well as more intelligent control of ignition, transmission, braking and other systems for improved fuel efficiency and safety. Also key are additional abilities to diagnose, present and even report vehicle status and systems fault information to remote mechanics, insurance agents and operators.
Easing design, manufacturing and maintenance tasks centers on consolidation of the several dozen 8- and 16-bit microprocessors that govern today’s automobiles and comparable vehicles to a substantially smaller number of networked 32 and 64 CPUs. In the past, diverse functions like ignition control, electrical system and engine temperature monitoring, anti-lock braking, and dashboard display systems each sported its own dedicated but minimally connected CPU. While such a distributed approach saves on wiring harness costs, it presents challenges to sourcing, integration, testing, monitoring and maintenance, and can raise costs through replication. With the advent of automotive and other industrial networking interconnects, as well as a range of wireless technologies, it is becoming more cost-effective to centralize instrumentation and control in a few more powerful processors.
For all of the above applications, virtualization technology is proving central to successful prototyping, development and deployment of a range of system types. In particular, transportation designs look to virtualization technology like Open Kernel Labs OKL4 platform for:
- Small memory footprint and open source code base for minimal impact on vehicle bill of materials
- Short path for consolidating subsystems and retargeting legacy code to next-generation hardware and software platforms
- Hardware support for key 32- and 64-bit SoCs, FPGAs and microcontrollers based on ARM and MIPS cores
- Robustness from hardware-enforced virtual machines or partitions
- Precise controllable allocation of CPU, memory and other resources to each virtual machine
- User space non-privileged execution of all guest OSes and other software
- Ability to host and segregate trusted and untrusted program execution (e.g., control and monitoring code from navigation and entertainment programs)
- High performance communication among guest operating systems and applications via either virtual or physical networking
- Isolation of open source code and closely held IP to meet contractual obligations and regulatory requirements