Novel software architecture for multi-core SoCs

According to Patrick Maccartee, director of product management and James Ready, CTO, Monta Vista, Monta Vista virtualization can be realized. The benefits to developers are clear in terms of lowered complexity, flexibility in development, high performance, first Linux configured for dataplane performance.

These were the conclusions from the seminar, where I was an invited audience, on Beyond Virtualization: The MontaVista Approach to Multi-core SoC Resource Allocation and Control.

Use cases for virtualization in the IT world include server consolidation, underutilization, management of numerous OSs and dependant applications.

Hardware considerations include very uniform server hardware platforms, especially, I/O, and an extensive processor support for virtualization. There also exists a huge uniform market for virtualization, with numerous successful companies of very large scale.

Embedded is different yet again. Embedded devices are already highly optimized, especially, in terms of size, power consumption, CPU utilization, etc. No layer of software makes a processor go faster. So far, it is not a big market.

Also, multi-core does not automatically mean either RTOS for data plane, hypervisors/virtualization and multiple OSs. In this scenario, what’s useful for embedded virtualization? The answer is MontaVista virtualization architecture