Industrial

Modern industrial automation and instrumentation applications combine traditional requirements for reliability and real-time responsiveness with the need to present end-users with a familiar windowed graphical user interface to bridge to CAD workstations and to front office productivity tools. For the last decade, this pair of divergent requirements has been met by “bolting on” Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris machines to traditional industrial and scientific equipment, with machine control function residing either in specialized circuitry embedded in the machine or instrument, or on a PCI card resident inside a PC.

Although such a system architecture in theory allows the embedded controller and PC each to perform tasks well-suited to resident hardware and software, it also suffers from a range of challenges to inter-system communication, integration, testing, ongoing application development, and maintenance.

Both deployed legacy industrial automation and instrumentation systems and new designs can benefit greatly from consolidating unwieldy “master and slave” systems into a virtualized single board computer system. Using Open Kernel Labs OKL4 virtualizing microkernel, complementary user interface code and mission-critical control software can execute in isolated virtual machine partitions, each optimized for the job and performance needs of the OS and applications running in it.

Open Kernel Labs OKL4 offers instrumentation and control applications developers:

  • A short path for consolidating sub-systems and retargeting legacy code to next-generation hardware and software platforms
  • Small memory footprint and open-source code base ease upgrade of legacy systems in place and long-term deployment support
  • Hardware support for key 32 and 64-bit SoCs, FPGAs, and microcontrollers based on ARM and MIPS cores
  • Precise controllable allocation of CPU, memory, and other resources to each virtual machine for both hard real-time and high throughput applications
  • User space non-privileged execution of all guest OSes and other software
  • Ability to share specialized device drivers among multiple guest OSes and/or isolate them, as needed
  • High-performance communication among guest operating systems and applications via either virtual or physical networking

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