fentISS, company leader in real-time embedded virtualization solutions for the Space market, has ported its XtratuM Next Generation (XNG) hypervisor to the RISC-V based architecture of Cobham Gaisler based on their NOEL-V processor.
As result of the company work in the De-RISC project, fentISS has extended its XNG hypervisor to support multicore architectures and the core peripherals required to run the hypervisor over the NOEL-V multicore platform used in the project. XNG provides the services needed by safety-critical systems such as partition management, support for system and non-system partitions, resource virtualization, temporal partitioning based on a cyclic scheduling policy, spatial partitioning using the hardware mechanisms for memory protection, inter-partition communication through sampling and queuing ARINC-653-like ports, and a health monitoring service which detects failures and implements mechanisms for fault containment.
XNG is complemented by the fentISS LithOS guest OS which provides an ARINC-653 APEX standard interface. XNG plus LithOS can be used as the basis of Integrated Modular Avionics architectures (IMA). XNG is ready to host third-party operating systems such as RTEMS or Linux allowing real-time critical applications to run in parallel with less critical AI or computer vision applications.
In the next project phase, fentISS will validate XNG over NOEL-V to make it ready for space qualification. Representative Aerospace applications will be ported to the De-RISC platform (NOEL-V+XNG) to further validate the potential of the technology developed in the project in real use cases. It is expected that the project outcomes will shorten the time-to-market of RISC‑V based architectures in aerospace applications and in other safety critical markets such as automotive, railways or medical equipment applications. The availability of the project solution (hardware and software) will strengthen the European non-dependence in the target markets addressed by the project.