Hypervisors are pretty complex pieces of software, and that means new ones don’t appear on the scene very often — although a few new hypervisors designed for container environments have hit the headlines in the last year or so.
But alongside containers, there is one other area of technology that has been touted to become huge in the next few years, and that’s the Internet of Things (IoT), which includes the potentially mega-huge Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). (To get some idea of scale, worldwide IIoT spending was estimated at about $20 billion in 2012, but it is forecast to reach $500 billion by 2020.)
With that in mind, the arrival on the scene of ACRN (pronounced “Acorn”) should not come as a huge surprise. What is ACRN? Put simply, it is an open source reference hypervisor that has been built to meet the unique needs of embedded IoT development. It was announced by the Linux Foundation in late March.
