Security and reliability are becoming requirements in entry-level smart embedded applications, especially critical for connected systems. Mobile, automotive, IoT, M2M, cloud computing, home automation, and a broad range of emerging markets will benefit from the combination of high performance and low power provided by the MIPS Warrior CPUs and the secure management enabled by the SELTECH Corporation.
SELTECH has designed the FOXvisor hypervisor to manage the processor, memory and system resources and set up independent virtual machines on a single CPU platform that can support multiple, unmodified, operating systems (OS) and applications in a secure environment. This provides task isolation, IP protection and reliability.
Secure, virtual machines have to date been used in high end processors. The MIPS M-class CPU IP cores announced by Imagination in February 2014 debuted as the world’s first entry-level, MCU class processors with support for hardware virtualization technology.
SELTECH Corporation has successfully developed the FOXvisor hypervisor to run on the MIPS M5150 core so that multiple operating systems such as RTOS and Linux can run independently, concurrently and safely on the same CPU, enabling multiple application domains secured by hardware virtualization.
FOXvisor is a Type 1 (so-called ‘bare-metal’) hypervisor that directly executes on the processor core. It is extremely compact in size (32 Kbytes), yet delivers the full functionality of a hypervisor. In addition, the hypervisor uses only 1% of CPU resources, leaving plenty of processing power for other applications.