Trango says its virtualization platform for embedded systems and mobile devices will soon support ARM Ltd.'s ARMv6 CPU architecture. The port, due next month, was motivated by customer requirements for enhanced connectivity, richer multimedia content, and increased security capabilities, the vendor said.

ARMv6 is the ISA (instruction set architecture) with which ARM builds ARM11-family cores, such as the ARM1136J(F)-S, ARM1156T2(F)-S, and ARM1176JZ(F)-S, among others. Compared to earlier ISAs, v6 offers memory system enhancements, improved exception handling, and better support for multiprocessing environments, ARM said. Other touted improvements include multimedia instructions with Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution, and optimizations for various audio-visual codecs.

Trango said its Hypervisor will let users run up to 256 “virtual processors” on a single ARM11 core. Each virtual processor can execute a rich operating system, such as Linux or Windows CE; a real-time operating system; or a standalone driver or application, according to the vendor.

Touted features and benefits include:

• Isolating proprietary code from code released under the GPL (GNU General Public License) or other open-source licenses — software in different partitions behaves as though on separate processors, the company claims
• Running a “rich OS” such as Windows CE or Linux in parallel with performance- or security-critical applications and services, such as DRM, with the latter being “fully isolated and protected against hardware and software attacks”
• Leveraging the enhanced performance of an ARMv6 CPU core, by integrating functions traditionally executed on two or more processors onto a single processor

NTT DoCoMo OSTI profile using Hypervisor
Source: Trango
Another claimed benefit for smartphone designers is that baseband/modem and application processing can be handled by virtual processors on a single physical chip, reducing BOM (bill of materials) costs.

Trango expects to release a new version of Hypervisor with support for ARM's ARMv6 architecture next month. The software currently runs on ARMv5, MIPS32, and MIPS64 processors.

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