Project Purpose

The Heterogeneous Virtio for Automotive Computing (HVAC) project works to deliver the flexibility, power, and standardization of Virtio to platforms with Linux and RTOS running on various CPU cores types and topographies. HVAC will demonstrate these capabilities in a realistic manner for Automotive use. It is expected that the technology itself will be applicable to other markets as well.

In addition the HVAC project will serve as a community focus point to drive the virtio-msg technology which will form the basis of most of the HVAC work.

Project Details

Overview

The HVAC project will deliver the following:

• Virtio between two OS’es that do not share a hypervisor

• Virtio device and driver on Zephyr while maintaining real-time performance and functional safety

• QEMU as a Linux user-space device model provider for these systems

• Linux kernel as a virtio driver side (device consumer)

• Xen as a hypervisor for Linux and RTOS

• QEMU as a development and demonstration platform for these systems

• A demonstration on real hardware aimed at the automotive market

The Technologies above should provide value in lots of use cases including:

• Linux + RTOS (or no OS)

• RTOS + RTOS

• Linux + Linux

• Inside a container or as a hypervisor guest

• In co-operation with secure world components as needed

• Heterogeneous cores on one SOC

• Heterogeneous systems constructed via PCIe interconnect

Intro Slides

Linux Kernel work

This diagram show the expected kernel architecture and the scope of HVAC, Trusty-virtio and future projects.

Roadmap

The project is marching toward a demo in the first weeks of January 2025 using AMD hardware that is an X86 host and an onboard ARM SOC (w/FPGA) that is connected via PCIe.

Items in Jira Project

Engaged Members

Arm, Google, and AMD Xilinx are engaged at the moment and others are expressing interest or are engaged on complementary work.