Virtual platform
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A virtual platform is a software emulation of a computer or embedded system.
A virtual platform contains the building blocks of a system, i.e. one or more processors, peripherals such as Ethernet and USB, and storage such as memory and disks.
It can be used for the development, testing, and operation of software, such as firmware, drivers, protocol stacks, OS, and application software. It is usually integrated with software development tools such as an IDE (integrated development environment), compilers, debuggers, but can also be used with any toolchain targeting the same target machine.
One particular, and commercially highly successful, variant of a virtual platform is a virtual machine as offered by VMware and Xen. Here, the virtual system is an x86-based PC with a restricted number of highly standardized components, such as USB 1.1 and 2.0, Ethernet controller, ATA disk drives, and VGA graphics. Very high performance of the emulated system, typically within 50%-75% of host performance, is made possible by directly using the memory and CPU of the host system, with some clever monitor software in the virtualization layer to model protected instructions and memory protection. See VMware and Xen for examples of x86-based virtual machines, and Hypervisor and Paravirtualization for more information on the techniques used for implementation.
For embedded systems, virtual platforms are available from vendors like Virtutech, Synopsys (via their Virtio acquisition), VaST Systems, and CoWare. There are also open-source solutions like SoftGun and QEMU. These typically simulate non-x86 processors like ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and others on an x86 PC.
[edit] References
- Enabling Early Software Development through Virtual System Prototyping, Filip Thoen, The EDN System Design Series, pp. 32-36. June 6, 2001. - first use of the term virtual platform.
- Virtual platform speeds advanced 3G phone development, linuxdevices.com, Jan. 2005.
- Virtual Platform facilitates embedded software development, thomasnet.com, Mar. 2005.
- Virtual platform technology comes to Linux, linuxdevices.com, Apr. 2005.
- Commercial Virtuality, Embedded Technology Journal, June 13, 2006.
[edit] External links
- VMware makes software for the virtualization of computer systems on PCs and servers.
- Xen a free virtual machine monitor for x86, Intel Itanium and PowerPC architectures.
