DornerWorks to develop space-qualified hypervisor for DARPA

June 28, 2013

Brandon Lewis

Technology Editor

Embedded Computing Design

GRAND RAPIDS, MI. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase 1 contract to DornerWorks to study hypervisors capable of supporting virtualization in satellite payloads. DornerWorks will work off of the open-source ARLX Hypervisor project, a flight-certifiable ARINC 653 partitioning environment that is based off of the Xen hypervisor and runs real-time Linux in each domain.

The ARLX Hypervisor project is the first attempt to adapt an open-source hypervisor for the ARINC 653 standard. ARLX will add ARINC 653 support to paravirtualized domain 0 Linux and the Xen hypervisor, which improves PC emulation of the target environment and allows developers to develop and debug on a PC platform before executing on target hardware.

The hypervisor will simultaneously integrate Multiple Independent Levels of Security (MILS), DO-178B level A, and multicore model-based checking. A “diff-impact” tool will also provide tracking and traceability for certification and assurance artifacts.

More information on the DornerWorks ARLX Hypervisor can be found at http://dornerworks.com/portfolio/bsp/.

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