The R-Car virtualization support package includes both the R-Car hypervisor development guide document and sample software for use as reference in such development for software vendors who develop the embedded hypervisors required for integrated cockpits and connected car applications.
A hypervisor is a virtualization operating system (OS) that allows multiple guest OSs, such as Linux, Android, and various real-time OSs (RTOS), to run independently on a single chip.
Renesas announced the R-Car hypervisor in April of last year, and the new R-Car virtualization Support Package was developed to help software vendors accelerate their development of R-Car hypervisors.
As more and more R-Car hypervisors become available from software vendors, OEM and Tier 1 companies will have a much wider choice of hypervisor options and will be able to select an optimal hypervisor for the combination of the guest OS to be run, and for the system of meter cluster and cloud services used. This will increase the flexibility of integrated cockpit system and connected car development and make development faster.
The third-generation R-Car SoCs were designed assuming that they would be used with a hypervisor. The Arm CPU cores, graphics cores, video/audio IP and other functions include virtualization functions and, originally, for software vendors to make use of these functions, they would have had to understand both the R-Car hardware manuals and the R-Car virtualization functions and start by looking into how to implement a hypervisor.
As a result of the new support package they need now only follow development guides in the R-Car virtualization package. Not only can software vendors easily take advantage of these functions, they will be able to take full advantage of the advanced features of R-Car. Also, by providing sample software that can be used as a reference, this package supports rapid development.
The R-Car Virtualization Support Package is scheduled to be available from July 2018.