We proudly announce a new collaboration: Together with Lauterbach, we are the industry’s first suppliers who enable the development, debugging, and testing of virtualized software architectures on future RISC-V platforms, even before the corresponding System-on-Chips (SoCs) are available.
RISC-V technology is gaining traction in all industry sectors, from automotive and avionics to IoT, in short: all the areas where secure and efficient software is essential. Our collaboration provides an early solution for developers. While the leading semiconductor suppliers in the automotive value chain have already committed to RISC-V, there are still no corresponding SoCs to enable virtualization on RISC-V CPUs.
Thanks to our partnership with Lauterbach – the leading manufacturer of development tools for embedded systems, that have defined debug and trace standards for RISC-V-based CPUs -, developers can now develop, debug, and test RISC-V software for virtualized software architectures on the well-known Generic RISC-V Virtual Platform implemented in QEMU.
A key challenge for the Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) is the execution of workloads with varying criticality and security levels on the same high-performance processor. For this, the different operating systems must be strongly isolated. A hypervisor can virtualize the underlying hardware and make sure that the workloads with their differing safety levels are executed in isolation on several Virtual Machines (VMs).
Our L4Re Hypervisor is particularly suited for those systems: It securely separates real-time workloads, even on very small chips, and runs in privileged mode on a minimal code base, making the certification process much easier, which saves customers a lot of time and resources.
By combining the flexibility of our open-source software with the open RISC-V architecture, we are able to support our customers with modern, secure solutions for a wide range of applications. Meanwhile, developers can use the Lauterbach TRACE32® debuggers and tracers to analyze the whole software stack, including the L4Re Hypervisor itself and all virtual machines (VM) with their operating systems and applications, and better see how many chip resources they are taking up.
Virtualization is crucial for the development of the Software-Defined Vehicle. Thanks to our collaboration, software developers can now start creating world-class software immediately, without having to wait until the RISC-V SoCs are delivered in silicon.