We are pleased to announce the second major release of the Project ACRN hypervisor.
ACRN v2.0 offers new and improved scenario definitions, with a focus on industrial IoT and edge device use cases. ACRN supports these uses with their demanding and varying workloads including Functional Safety certification, real-time characteristics, device and CPU sharing, and general computing power needs, while honoring required isolation and resource partitioning. A wide range of User VM OSs (such as Windows 10, Ubuntu, Android, and VxWorks) can run on ACRN, running different workloads and applications on the same hardware platform.
A new hybrid-mode architecture adds flexibility to simultaneously support both traditional resource sharing among VMs and complete VM resource partitioning required for functional safety requirements.
ACRN V2 Architecture
Workload management and orchestration, rather standard and mature in cloud environments, are enabled now in ACRN, allowing open source orchestrators such as OpenStack to manage ACRN virtual machines. Kata Containers, a secure container runtime, has also been enabled on ACRN and can be orchestrated via Docker or Kubernetes.
Rounding things out, we’ve also made significant improvements in configuration tools, added many new tutorial documents, and enabled ACRN on the QEMU machine emulator making it easier to try out and develop with ACRN.
See the ACRN v2.0 release notes for more details about this release, and key features compared with the 1.0 release.
ACRN is a flexible, lightweight reference hypervisor that is built with real-time and safety-criticality in mind. It is optimized to streamline embedded development through an open source platform. Check out What is ACRN for more information.
All project ACRN source code is maintained in the https://github.com/projectacrn/acrn-hypervisor repository and includes folders for the ACRN hypervisor, the ACRN device model, tools, and documentation. You can either download this source code as a zip or tar.gz file (see the ACRN v2.0 GitHub release page) or use Git clone and checkout commands:
git clone https://github.com/projectacrn/acrn-hypervisor cd acrn-hypervisor git checkout v2.0
The project’s online technical documentation is also tagged to correspond with a specific release: generated v2.0 documents can be found at https://projectacrn.github.io/2.0/. Documentation for the latest (master) branch is found at https://projectacrn.github.io/latest/. Follow the instructions in the Getting Started Guide for ACRN Industry Scenario with Ubuntu Service VM to get started with ACRN.
We recommend that all developers upgrade to ACRN release v2.0.
