Virtual Open Systems Newsletter

Software products and services for automotive, industrial, IoT and cloud systems

Open source innovation: virtio-loopback released

Virtual Open Systems works closely with the AGL community and the Linux Foundation to implement an automotive grade virtio abstraction layer that enables transparent application development and execution on both real hardware, virtualized environments and cloud. In occasion of the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit event in Japan (Tokyo, December 4-7th 2023), a demonstration has showcased multiple vhost-user-sound devices running at the same time via virtio-loopback. The operating system used is the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) Pike, and the target hardware is the AGL Reference Hardware, an AGL custom automotive hardware platform based on the Renesas R-Car H3 System-on-Chip. The objective of the demo is to see virtio-loopback in action while running two virtual audio cards. Interestingly, with virtio-loopback workloads prioritization can be easily applied without touching the system kernel but simply using existing user space tools (e.g., wirepluber, taskset, etc.).

Development services: Customized virtualization infrastructure

Virtual Open Systems does care a lot about its customers. Meeting the customer’s expectations and deadlines is of topmost importance. Furthermore, we believe that the communication is one important factor for a successful collaboration: the crystal-clear communication and prompt reporting makes the customer deeply involved in the project to not miss any technical breakthrough of the project. Development services carried on by Virtual Open Systems aims to extend the limits of the known state of the art. One of the last projects VOS has contributed for one of his customer is about the implementation of a concept that aims at revolutionizing the architecture of a cloud distributed system, making heavily use of virtualization, for which the high level customer specification guidelines have been duly understood and captured by VOS in a detailed statement of work, prior to the start of its implementation.

Horizon Europe: AERO project steadily progressing

The AERO project aims to build a complete open source software ecosystem for the European Process Initiative (EPI). Virtual Open Systems's contribution will be focused on the low level software layer of the Arm-v8 general purpose processor integrated in the project platform. More in particular, VOSySmonitor product will be ported to ARMv8.4 and ARMv9 architectures, supporting the execution of virtual machines in the secure world. This will open the use of the VOSySmonitor technology also in the cloud computing market.

Horizon Europe: Vitamin-V building RISC-V cloud foundations

Vitamin-V Horizon Europe project targets to create a complete virtualized ecosystem for RISC-V, able to offer the means for testing and prototyping a full system stack before the availability of the hardware. Virtual Open Systems focus on updating some rust-vmm components in order to facilitate its porting to RISC-V, for which there is the need to tackle with the introduction of the RISC-V architecture, from its reference implementation supporting ARMv8 and x86. The first month 9 (M9) review of the project took place, supervised by a board made by the European Project Officer and two technical. The review meeting was a success, thanks to the great involvement of all the partners and the impeccable lead of the UPC coordinator partner.

Horizon Europe: NANCY, next-gen 5G and above architecture

The NANCY Horizon Europe project, started in January 2023, aims at realizing a secure and intelligent architecture for the beyond the fifth generation (B5G) wireless network. Virtual Open Systems is providing its expertise in the virtualization area, providing as well a novel virtualization solution based on its VOSySmonitor to enable the execution of “baremetal virtual machines” at the edge as well as a lightweight layer to interface with the NANCY’s orchestration software. More information can be found in NANCY’s website.

Product development: VOSySmonitoRV, RISC-V partitioning

Virtual Open Systems sees great potential in RISC-V, the new emerging architecture for embedded systems, cloud and automotive markets. This is why it is working on VOSySmonitoRV, the RISC-V port of the company's VOSySmonitor product. Despite the early stage of the development of this RISC-V partitioning product, Virtual Open Systems has brought at the Beijing RISC-V summit in August 2023 an interesting demonstration of its potentialities. In the demonstration VOSySmonitoRV is configured to simultaneously run three OSes on a Lichee Pi 4A board, a powerful RISC-V board manufactured by Sipeed featuring a quad-cores TH1520 SoC. Specifically, there are two FreeRTOS instances running each of them on a dedicated core. The two other cores are running Linux with a car cluster application mockup with two gauges (RPMs and speed of the car). More information and the video demo in the dedicated page of our website!

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