| Microkernel software virtualizes Windows CE on ARMv6 |
Dec. 11, 2007
 OK Labs says its microkernel for processor virtualization is now ready to support the ARMv6 architecture and Windows CE. The company hopes that as a result, mobile phone designers using ARM11-based processors will tap its OKL4 microkernel to add security features such as DRM, or to enable single-core architectures.
(Click for larger view of OK's microkernel diagram)
OK Labs competitor Trango, meanwhile, announced similar capabilities in June.
OKL4 says its port of OKL4 to ARMv6 supports MMU (memory management unit) and cache architectures. The company claims that OKL4 can perform fast context switching between virtualized processes by using the ARMv6 address space identifier (ASID) feature.
The OKL4 architecture
The OKL 4 microkernel OS includes a real-time POSIX execution environment, and can serve as a virtual platform for running Windows CE and other "guest" OSes. Windows CE can reportedly be run alongside real-time operating systems (RTOSes) such as eCos, iTron, or Nucleus.
OK Labs claims OKL4 offers provides an extremely small "trusted security base" for services that would be impossible or impractical to implement outside the kernel. Crypto services, for example, can be designed to use less than 20,000 lines of system code, thereby helping to improve performance and reduce opportunities for security threats, the company claims. Graphical native OKL4 applications are even possible, thanks to a lightweight graphics stack called Fluffy Spider FancyPants.
Running each OS personality in a separate user space partition is said to enable license segregation and protection, as well as protection from software faults. In other words, an OS crash in userspace may not crash the whole system. For example, a mobile phone could still place a call if the OS crashed while editing a photo or the like. Yet another touted benefit is that the OS segregation enabled by virtualization could enable GPL-licensed software to co-exist with closed software, such as software-defined radio basebands, on the same processor.
ARMv6 is the ISA (instruction set architecture) with which ARM builds ARM11-family cores, such as the ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, and ARM1176JZ(F)-S, among others. Compared to earlier ISAs, v6 offers memory system enhancements, improved exception handling, and better support for multiprocessing environments, ARM said. Other touted improvements include multimedia instructions with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution, and optimizations for various audio-visual codecs.
ARM11 cores are popular in a variety of SoCs aimed at mobile phones, including TI's OMAP2xxx, Marvell's PXA3xx, and Freescale's i.MX3x processors.
Toshiba W47T
(Click for details) |
OK launched in April as a spin-off of NICTA (National Information/Communication Technology, Australia), an Australian government-sponsored think tank. NICTA previously supplied an "L4" microkernel to phone chip giant Qualcomm, and Qualcomm customer Toshiba reportedly used the stack in its Linux-based W47T phone (pictured at right).
Availability
The OKL4 microkernel is available now, says OK, and can be downloaded here along with the company's OK Linux distribution, under either an open source or commercial use license. In addition to ARMv6, it is said to be available under either a commercial or an open source license for the ARM v4/v5 architectures used in ARM9 and legacy XScale cores, with releases planned soon for x86 (32- and 64-bit versions), MIPS32, and MIPS64.
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