Ravensburg, Germany – February 12, 2008 – Outstanding technical innovations in embedded technologies have been nominated for awards by an independent jury of experts for the fifth time at embedded world 2008 in Nuremberg, Germany. Real-Time Systems GmbH with their RTS Hypervisor have been nominated for the award along with two other companies in the category “Software”. The winners of the embedded Award 2008 will be announced at the opening ceremony the night before the show, on Monday, February 25th.

Software is the key to making truly effective use of multi-core processors. The RTS Real-Time Hypervisor is a software system that makes it possible to run several identical or dissimilar operating systems on an x86 multicore execution platform in a safe, simultaneous and independent fashion. Under the Hypervisor, each operating system is exclusively assigned at least one processor core. Then, by means of a single configuration file, system resources, such as peripheral devices and memory areas, are exclusively allocated to individual operating systems. Because any real-time operating systems in the Hypervisor’s  execution environment access their assigned peripheral devices directly, there is nothing to compromise an operating system’s hard real-time capabilities. Besides that, the fact that peripheral devices are assigned exclusively to individual operating systems, means that resources such as PCI-bus devices require no special drivers; they use conventional drivers instead. With this product, not only can a user specify the order in which the operating systems are to be started, but operating systems may also be individually rebooted while the rest of the system continues running without disruption. A Shared Memory and Virtual Network provide for communications between otherwise strictly separated operating systems. Summing up: the Real-Time Hypervisor opens up new possibilities for software design. Applications that previously required multiple execution platforms can now be run on a  single multicore platform. And because of the implicit reduction of hardware and system complexity, overall system costs are reduced while the MTBF increases. The RTS Hypervisor, Version 1.5, is available now.