Blog Introduction: Multi-Core Processors and the Emerging Embedded Virtual Machine Reality

Posted by Mark Conrad on Sep 30 2007 under   

For many years (about 20+) I have been awaiting the arrival of micro-processors powerful enough to run most of the popular operating systems while emulating through virtualization each of the respective native machine environments. As many know, IBM invented the Multiple Virtual Machine Environment (circa 1960’s,1970’s, 1980’s, to present day, re: IBM OS/MVS which runs exclusively on big, expensive mainframe hardware). While truly a brilliant idea, it is amazing in some respects that it took the ‘core idea’ of MVS so long to make it into ‘Server Class Machines’ (circa 1990’s – VMware/others). Desktop Virtualization is about to explode onto the market, only to quickly be followed by Embedded Virtual Machines. Just this month XenSource claims a first (it is strongly believed that others have been using embedded VMs for at least 1-2 years ahead of XenSource (XenSource Announces Market’s First Embedded Hypervisor http://www.xensource.com/PressReleases/Pages/pr090507.aspx ). XenSources’ claim to fame perhaps is the distinction of Hypervisor verses non-Hypervisor Virtualization. Hypervisors for performance reasons require extra support in hardware beyond the typical virtual memory, and virtual IO support many embedded processors already provide – especially those that run Embedded Linux with MMUs).

The purpose of this Blog is all things ‘Embedded Virtual Machines’. This includes the single and multi-core processor hardware chips which run Multiple Virtual Machines as well as the Embedded Virtual Machine Software Architectures. Additionally, I intend to cover the use of Multiple Virtual Machines (MVMs) for development. I have been heavily using just such an environment (VMware Workstation 4, 5,, & 6) in my consulting work for several years. My current embedded development environment is to use multiple instances of VMware Guest OSes (Linux: Fedora Core, BSD, and occasionally even MSDOS, and Windows 98) running on a base platform running Windows XP. In the future I expect to drop Microsoft Windows (as base OS) in favor of Linux/KVM as base OS (which I expect to run Windows XP as a 32 bit Guest OS).

I am going to document (as often as possible) the Embedded Virtual Machine Hardware and Software Platforms (embedded development and runtime systems). I will appreciate as much information and help from all of the readers of this blog as possible. I look forward to your helpful thoughts and comments.

Best regards and welcome to my blog.

Mark Conrad

Article Copyrighted, @copyright 2007 Mark Conrad, Computer Labs, Inc., Colorado Springs, Colorado

Rate this article:

Rating: 3 | Votes: 2

posted by Mark Conrad
Mark Conrad is CTO of Computer Labs, Inc., a research, engineering, and consulting firm. With 28 years experience in Embedded Systems, specializing in Networking and Network Storage Systems, Mark’s recent assignments include Cisco, Seagate, Brocade, & IBM. He is interested in Multi-Core Linux, BSD, and RTOS systems and the evolving use of virtual systems for development and runtime.

all articles by Mark Conrad