Architecture And Application Of Hypervisor In FACE Environment With Safety Assurance

Collins Aerospace recognizes the value the warfighter gets from reducing the Size, Weight and Power (SWAP) of the avionics systems. The war fighter also sees benefit from reuse of existing avionics and mission software modules, which frequently vary in software framework and thus are allocated to separate processors. A solution, as seen in the commercial IT industry would be the use of multi-core processing and hypervisors allowing the mixing of frameworks providing rapid integration with minimal SWAP. In avionics we must additionally provide assurance. This paper will explore our application of the FACE™ Technical Standard (Ref. [1]) to obtain framework variability, used in conjunction with a hypervisor to allow the resulting frameworks to exist in a single multi-core processing environment with safety assurance to the solution. The concept proposed was validated through demonstration of US Army and Collins software running on the same multi-core processor.