April 2009 Archives

Earlier this year there was a discussion with my technial sales colleagues regarding what is the right level of virtualization. This may sound a bit superfluously these times as there are plenty of technical excellent implementations like KVM for Linux out there. But do we need to use a sledgehammer to crack a nut?

Many years ago Henry Spencer wrote down what he considered to be ten of the most fundamental rules all C programmers should follow. Reading them now they seem almost funny (anyone still program for a VAX?). But for an embedded engineer they still ring true.

News from Embedded Systems Conference 2009, in San Jose: "Accomplished for the first time in a commercially available phone, Chicago-based Open Kernel Labs's mobile virtualisation solution enabled Linux and an RTOS to run side by side on a single ARM processor."

The firm produces the 'virtualisation' software: code which controls access to hardware resources, allowing both the RTOS and Linux to run separately as though there were the only operating system on the processor. Such software is also known as a hypervisor.

Read the full article: OKL hypervisor runs Linux and RTOS on Motorola's QA4