Wind River has announced a new real-time virtualization solution for VxWorks Real Time Operating System (RTOS) to make Internet of Things (IoT) technology safer.
“Embedded virtualization allows customers to meet the challenges of the IoT era; it enables a future-proof architecture that can adapt and evolve to meet changing market requirements, customer needs, and technology advancements,” said Dinyar Dastoor, vice president and general manager of operating system platforms at Wind River. “With these latest virtualization and security capability enhancements, Wind River has further strengthened VxWorks as the leading RTOS for IoT where connectivity, scalability and the ability to develop safer and more secure environments are paramount.”
With IoT virtualization, customers can consolidate virtual devices onto one physical server. The VirtIO storage virtualization lets several devices share a single disk controller as well as a disk.
Security is a major concern already and doubly so for Internet of Things. Since IoT devices can control critical infrastructure, failure can not only mean loss of data, but loss of property and life. Getting hacked is scary enough, but there have been proof of concepts for things like taking control of connected cars away from the driver.
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The Security Profile for VxWorks comes with a number of features, including secure boot, secure load and data encryption.
The new version of VxWorks has greater support for low-power processors such as the Intel Celeron and Atom chips.
GE is one of the companies that’s already taking advantage of Wind River’s application of virtualization to IoT.
“Virtualization is a key attribute in GE’s global vision for industrial control systems in the era of the Industrial Internet. It allows the GE businesses to combine their real-time control logic, HMI, security, and cloud connectivity into a single platform,” said Wes Skeffington, principal engineer at GE. “Wind River’s virtualization offering provides the right attributes like scalability, storage virtualization, real-time behavior, virtual machine isolation, and security capabilities to realize this vision.”
