Today at the Embedded Linux Conference, the Linux Foundation today announced ACRN, a new embedded reference hypervisor project. The goal of the project is to provide a framework to build an open source embedded hypervisor specifically for the Internet of Things (IoT). There are two main components of ACRN -- the hypervisor and a device model, complete with rich I/O mediators.

“With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “ACRN’s optimization for resource-constrained devices and focus on isolating safety-critical workloads and giving them priority make the project applicable across many IoT use cases. We’re pleased to welcome project ACRN and invite embedded developers to get involved in the new community.”

The foundation said that consolidating a diverse set of IoT workloads with mixed-criticality on to a single platform helps reduce both development and deployment costs allowing for more streamlined system architecture.

Intel has been the major code contributor to the project.

Source: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press-release/the-linux-foundation-announces-an-open-source-reference-hypervisor-project-designed-for-iot-device-development/