The ACRN™ Open Source Hypervisor for IoT Development Announces ACRN v2.0 and Functional Safety Certification Concept Approval

New hybrid-mode architecture expands the scope of the project to include industrial IoT and edge device use cases, delivers new flexibility in resource sharing across virtual machines and new levels of real-time and functional safety

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The Linux Foundation

Jul 21, 2020, 11:00 ET

SAN FRANCISCO, July 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Project ACRN™, an open source IoT hypervisor hosted at the Linux Foundation, today is announcing ACRN v2.0, which expands the scope of the project and introduces a new hybrid-mode architecture with a focus on industrial IoT and edge device use cases, delivering flexibility in resource sharing and new levels of real-time and functional safety for demanding workloads in both the automotive and industrial segments.

"The ACRN project is moving fast to address the increasingly complex requirements for IoT devices, networks and environments," said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation. "This speed and agility in development can only be achieved through collaboration and we're happy to be able to support this important work."

Eddie Dong, senior Principal Engineer, architect, and maintainer of Project ACRN said, "The rapid evolution and development from version 1.0 to 2.0 in a year demonstrates the momentum of this project and the demand for a flexible, real-time, safety-critical, open source hypervisor for industrial players that are architecting mission-critical technologies."

ACRN version 2.0
ACRN 2.0 uses a hybrid-mode architecture to support real-time industrial IoT workloads and edge devices and simultaneously supports both traditional resource sharing among Virtual Machines (VMs) and complete VM resource partitioning required for functional safety. Workload management and orchestration are also enabled now with ACRN, allowing open source orchestrators such as OpenStack to manage ACRN VMs. ACRN supports secure container runtimes such as Kata Containers orchestrated via Docker or Kubernetes.

ACRN 2.0 main features include:

ACRN architecture upgrade to support hybrid mode
New hardware platform support
Pre-launched Safety VM support
Post-launched VM support via OVMF
Post-launched Real-time VM support
Real-time VM performance optimizations
CPU sharing support
Large selection of OSes for user VMs
GRUB bootloader
SR-IOV support
Both passthrough and shared Graphics support
Shared memory based inter-VM communication
Configuration tools support
Kata Containers Support
VM orchestration
Improved Documentation

Rina Raman, Vice President and General Manager of the Embedded Acceleration Division at Intel Corporation said, "The fourth industrial revolution, characterized by a fusion of disruptive technologies, requires agility and the ability to consolidate heterogeneous workloads, some of which carry very strict requirements of Functional Safety certification or Real-Time behavior. With its 2.0 release, Project ACRN is now offering an open source hypervisor that makes such workload consolidation possible."

Thomas Berndorfer, CTO, TTTech Industrial said, "ACRN 2.0 prioritizes the three key requirements for hypervisors today in the Industrial IoT and edge environments: functional safety, real-time, and flexibility for resource sharing among virtual machines. This set of features is uniquely found in ACRN. Contributing actively to the project allows us to shape the future of this critical and rapidly developing technology. ACRN delivers a flexible, real-time, open source hypervisor for industries that have the world's most demanding mission-critical requirements."

You can find details about these features and more in the ACRN 2.0 release notes: https://projectacrn.github.io/latest/release_notes/release_notes_2.0.html

ACRN Functional Safety Certification - Safety Concept Approval
ACRN has successfully received concept approval from TÜV SÜD Rail GmbH for its functional safety concept, design and management process in place. The concept approval letter claims that "ACRN Hypervisor is able to fulfill the requirements in accordance with SIL 3 of the IEC 61508 standard." TÜV SÜD is a trusted partner of choice for safety, security, and sustainability solutions. IEC 61508 is considered as the "Golden Standard" in the functional safety industry. ACRN is on track to receive the final functional safety certification by the end of 2020.

About the ACRN Project
ACRN is a flexible, lightweight reference hypervisor that is built with real-time and safety-criticality in mind. It is optimized to streamline embedded development through an open source platform. ACRN Project members include ADLINK, Aptiv, Intel Corporation, LGE, and Neusoft Corporation. To learn more about the project, visit projectacrn.org.

About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux Foundation is supported by more than 1,000 members and is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit linuxfoundation.org.

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