Machine and process safety has colored many a conversation during conferences of the past couple of months. Here, Wind River has introduced a safety profile for its next-generation version of VxWorks.
Highlights of the release:
- Safety Profile for VxWorks delivers functionality aimed at development of safety critical systems across wide range of market segments.
- New features include advanced time and space partitioning on multi-core and optional IEC 61508-3 SIL3 certification evidence package.
- Wind River continues its legacy of helping customers address the most critical safety requirements with robust safety features across its product portfolio.
The profile adds safety features to VxWorks 7 aimed at development of safety critical systems in industrial, medical, transportation, aerospace, and defense. Additionally, Wind River has enhanced its Virtualization Profile for VxWorks.
The new Safety Profile for VxWorks delivers advanced time and space partitioning capabilities to ensure reliable, interference-free consolidation of multiple applications with different levels of safety criticality on one hardware platform, single or multi-core. Consolidation helps customers meet stringent safety requirements with a variety of system design options while driving down bill-of-material and maintenance costs. Furthermore, separation of applications of different criticality levels allows customers to update specific applications in a targeted fashion, without having to retest or recertify the entire system.
Standard conformance pre-approval
In addition, the profile has received pre-approval by TÜV SÜD for IEC 61508-3 SIL3 conformance. The optional certification evidence package will help VxWorks customers reduce cost, risk, and time-to-certification for their embedded systems. Safety Profile will also serve as the future foundation that will help customers certify their devices to additional IEC standards.
“With Safety Profile for VxWorks, developers can take full advantage of technological advances in microprocessors that VxWorks enables, with the confidence that they will have a strong OS foundation to meet the most demanding safety certification standards,” said Dinyar Dastoor, vice president of product management at Wind River. “For three-plus decades Wind River has been a trusted technology partner to companies in markets where safety and reliability are paramount, and this is just another proof point of our commitment to providing robust safety features across our product portfolio.”
Separately, the recently launched Virtualization Profile for VxWorks now provides support for device virtualization through the open VirtIO standard. Device virtualization further reduces the mechanical footprint and cost base of consolidated systems, and lowers the barrier to virtualization in the embedded domain, while the use of the VirtIO standard allows any operating system to use the virtualized devices.
Recognized as the industry-leading RTOS, VxWorks boasts a modular, scalable architecture that separates the VxWorks core from middleware, applications, and other packages, enabling bug fixes, upgrades, and new feature additions to be accomplished faster.
