ACRN is an open source reference hypervisor, built to meets the unique needs of embedded IoT development. Today’s connected devices are increasingly expected to support a range of hardware resources, operating systems, software tools, and applications. Virtualization is vital to meet these broad needs, however, existing VM solutions don’t offer the right size and flexibility for IoT.

Datacenter hypervisor code is too big, and its boot time is too slow. It doesn’t offer safety-critical workload capabilities and requires too much overhead for embedded development. Proprietary solutions are expensive and make it difficult to deliver long-term product support. There’s a pressing need for a reference hypervisor that meets the specialized needs of embedded IoT product development. Project ACRN™ provides the answer.

Launched in March 2018 as a Linux Foundation project, ACRN has a Linux*-based Service VM and runs guest VMs simultaneously, providing a powerful software platform to build complex computing systems. A guest VM can run Linux* or Windows* or an RTOS such as Zephyr*, and more.

ACRN is a type 1 reference hypervisor stack that runs on bare-metal hardware, with fast booting, and configurable for a variety of IoT and embedded device solutions. The ACRN hypervisor architecture partitions the system into different functional domains, with carefully selected user VM sharing optimizations for IoT and embedded devices. See our project documentation for more details about the ACRN Architecture and use cases.

ACRN defines a hypervisor reference stack and an architecture for running multiple software subsystems. Multiple OSs and VMs are managed securely, on a consolidated system by means of efficient virtualization with resource partitioning that ensures co-existing safety and non-safety critical domains on one SOC.  It also defines a reference framework implementation for virtual device emulation, called the “ACRN Device Model”, with rich I/O mediators that satisfy low-latency access needs.

Project ACRN encourages and invites the embedded developer community to participate, contribute code, and further our effort to provide a high-quality open source embedded reference hypervisor.  Join us!