Project ACRN has released version 2 of its IoT hypervisor. Supported by the Linux Foundation, ACRN is an open-source, lightweight hypervisor that supports IoT functions including graphics, imaging, and audio in less under 40K lines of code.

The developers say ACRN is optimized to streamline embedded development designed to fill the gap between datacenter hypervisors and hard partitioning hypervisors.

It has a device hypervisor reference stack and an architecture for running multiple software subsystems on a consolidated system by means of a virtual machine manager. It also defines a reference framework implementation for virtual device emulation, called the ACRN Device Model. The ACRN Hypervisor is a Type 1 reference hypervisor stack, running directly on the bare-metal hardware, so is suitable for IoT and embedded device use.

The improvements to ACRN v2 start with new and improved scenario definitions, with a focus on those suitable for industrial IoT and edge devices. ACRN's new support includes Functional Safety certification, real-time characteristics, device and CPU sharing, and general computing power needs,. A number of User VM operating systems including Windows 10, Ubuntu, Android, and VxWorks can run on ACRN, running different workloads and applications on the same hardware platform.

Another improvement to the new release is a new hybrid-mode architecture designed to add flexibility so ACRN can simultaneously support both traditional resource sharing among VMs and complete VM resource partitioning required for functional safety requirements.

The new version also adds support for 8th Gen Intel Core Processors. It supports pre-launched partitioned safety VM, and post-launched VM via Open Virtual Machine Firmware (OVMF), as well as post-launched real-time VM.

More Information

Project ACRN Website

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