Green Hills Software, Inc., the largest independent supplier of embedded software solutions, today announced the INTEGRITY®
Multivisor™, a multicore hypervisor for ARM® Cortex-A9 MPCore™ processors. The INTEGRITY Multivisor is built on
INTEGRITY, the world's market-leading, high-reliability RTOS and the only technology certified by USA's National Security Agency to
EAL6+ High Robustness, the highest level of security ever achieved for any software product.
The INTEGRITY Multivisor unlocks the performance potential of multicore designs, reduces OEM costs through processor consolidation, increases battery life by facilitating intelligent multicore power management, enables new usage models such as dual operating system personalities on a single device, and reduces cost and time-to-market for platform suppliers and OEMs by reusing proven versions of multimedia operating systems, such as Android and Linux.
"The Cortex-A9 processor delivers unprecedented performance-efficiency for an upcoming generation of connected mobile devices," said Gordon Jones, vice president of Green Hills Software's Embedded Virtualization Business Unit. "However, taking maximum advantage of a multicore platform requires a systems software solution that can securely consolidate disparate workloads: controlling peripheral access, minimizing power consumption across cores, and providing flexible APIs for sophisticated new usage models."
"We welcome the development of the INTEGRITY Multivisor which delivers a powerful systems software foundation optimized for the Cortex-A9 MPCore processor," commented Eric Schorn, vice president of marketing, Processors Division, ARM. "The Green Hills Multivisor is a valuable addition to the range of optimized solutions available to Cortex-A9 licensees through the ARM Connected Community™ ecosystem."
About INTEGRITY Multivisor
INTEGRITY Multivisor for the ARM Cortex-A9 processor is a member of the family of INTEGRITY Secure Virtualization (ISV) solutions. ISV consists of the certified INTEGRITY real-time microkernel technology coupled with facilities to execute one or more "guest" operating systems. INTEGRITY Secure Virtualization also provides a native environment for specialized applications, such as security functionality, fast-boot web browsers, and platform/OEM multimedia and communications codecs. The INTEGRITY RTOS's advanced architecture enables virtual machines and applications to safely co-exist with guaranteed memory, CPU time resources, and strictly enforced device access control.
INTEGRITY Secure Virtualization offers several approaches to virtualization in ARM-powered devices. ISV can use paravirtualization to host Android and other guest operating systems. Alternatively, ISV can host unmodified guest operating systems ("full" virtualization) by using advanced software virtualization techniques as well as hardware acceleration when available.
In addition to virtualization, ISV can optionally be used as a Secure Execution Mode for ARM TrustZone® technology-enabled processors. Security-critical applications such as cryptographic algorithms and protocols used for DRM, critical financial transactions, and firmware authentication are isolated from the primary user environment by a combination of TrustZone hardware and INTEGRITY software partitioning. ISV provides an efficient API for strictly controlled access to TrustZone security services.
For platform suppliers and OEMs who must support multiple multimedia operating systems, ISV can provide significant cost and time-to-market savings by enabling all of these operating systems to run on the latest hardware without porting.
In addition to its security and reliability features, ISV comes with more than a decade of tools and a middleware ecosystem to help platform suppliers and OEMs develop and deploy products faster. The INTEGRITY RTOS is supported by thousands of device drivers, network stacks, file systems, JVMs, and many other components -- pre-integrated and ready to deploy.