November 18, 2014 – Wind River introduced a safety profile for its VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS). The profile adds safety features to VxWorks 7 aimed at development of safety critical systems in industrial, medical, transportation, aerospace, and defense. The Safety Profile for VxWorks delivers advanced time and space partitioning capabilities to ensure reliable, interference-free consolidation of multiple applications with different levels of safety criticality on one hardware platform, single or multi-core. Consolidation helps customers meet stringent safety requirements with a variety of system design options while driving down bill-of-material and maintenance costs.
Furthermore, separation of applications of different criticality levels allows customers to update specific applications in a targeted fashion, without having to retest or recertify the entire system. In addition, the profile has received pre-approval by TÜV SÜD for IEC 61508-3 SIL3 conformance. The optional certification evidence package will help VxWorks customers reduce cost, risk, and time-to-certification for their embedded systems. Safety Profile will also serve as the future foundation that will help customers certify their devices to additional IEC standards. Separately, the recently launched Virtualization Profile for VxWorks now provides support for device virtualization through the open VirtIO standard.
Device virtualization further reduces the mechanical footprint and cost base of consolidated systems, and lowers the barrier to virtualization in the embedded domain, while the use of the VirtIO standard allows any operating system to use the virtualized devices.
