February 28, 2020 - Acontis announced the availability of its Type 1 Hypervisor for its real-time technology, called acontis Hypervisor . This enhancement of the real-time solutions from acontis now enables customers to fulfill demands for more sophisticated use cases. This solution is designed for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices, Edge Controllers, and high-end real-time hardware and workload consolidation. The offering from acontis combines the existing virtual machine hypervisor technology for real-time operating systems (RTOS VM), with the industry standard Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor for standard operating systems.
With acontis’ existing, real-time virtualization technology multiple hard real-time operating systems (Real-time Linux, VxWorks, etc.) can run in native speed. Now, with the addition of KVM to the solution, multiple standard operating systems like Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, etc.) can operate in parallel to the real-time operating systems. KVM also provides para-virtualization and passthrough of PCI, USB, and VGA devices for the highest possible performance.
Each guest OS is fully independent and separate and can be restarted, or completely shut down, while the other guests continue without being affected. The RTOS Virtual Machine hypervisor technology provides an independent layer to run any RTOS in native speed. There is no virtualization overhead introduced and all RTOS drivers, operating systems, and even the applications have direct and fast hardware access. The acontis Hypervisor solution utilizes this exact same RTOS VM technology without any modifications, so existing customer applications can be used without needing to update or change anything.
KVM Hypervisor is commonly found in security critical systems that require high-availability, like the cloud solutions from Google (Google Cloud Platform), Amazon (AWS) or Oracle (Oracle Cloud). To increase performance, devices for USB, Ethernet, and/or Graphics (GPU) can be completely passed through to the standard guests like Windows or Linux. Alternatively, it is possible to paravirtualize devices for the hard disk, ethernet, or graphics controller to reduce the amount of necessary hardware without compromising throughput.
