[18 June 2009] XtratuM has been selected for a ESA project with Astrium SAS (project leader) and Teletel

Xtratum hypervisor has been selected by the European Space Agency (ESA) for Securely Partitioning Spacecraft Computing Resources project.

The goal of this project is to substantially contribute to the technological foundation for earth observation, telecom and navigation missions as well as new ESA initiatives in the dual-use, security and defence sectors, enabling dual and/or multiple use of space resources. Specifically, the activity will contribute to the technological foundation to enable future evolutions of earth observation, telecom and navigation missions to be of multiple use nature, providing service to commercial, scientific, civilian security and defence endeavours simultaneously from a single platform.

About XtratuM

XtratuM is a bare-metal hypervisor specially designed for critical real-time embedded systems. It provides a framework to run several operating systems (or real-time executives) in a robust partitioned environment. XtratuM can be used to build a MILS (Multiple Independent Levels of Security) architecture.

XtratuM is the first hypervisor for LEON processors used in the ESA projects. It permits the execution of multiple independent applications developed for different real-time operating systems.

The porting of XtratuM to LEON2 processors was an initial project leaded by CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales). As result of this project, XtratuM has demonstrate its great potential for building and executing partitioned systems with a very low overhead.

In this new project, XtratuM will be ported to LEON3 processors and will be used to build on top of it an operational scenario of a flight-representative environment.

About the consortium

EADS is a global leader in aerospace, defence and related services. The Group includes the aircraft manufacturer Airbus, the world's largest helicopter supplier Eurocopter and EADS Astrium, the European leader in space programmes from Ariane to Galileo.

The Real-Time Systems Group at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia has been deeply involved in the GPL distribution of the RTLinux platform for realtime systems, developing most of the basic POSIX functionality of this system and adaptations of protocols for real-time networking and distributed computing. The group has also made contributions in the field of real-time systems scheduling. Other research areas of the group include application of real-time systems to control and to robotics.

Teletel S.A. is a leading software and hardware development company, committed to offering innovative solutions to its customers, setting industry standards and delivering a wide range of cost-effective products.

[9 February 2009] XtratuM 2.1.0 for LEON2 available for download

After several months of tough work, the XtratuM 2.1.0 version is available for download (see download section for further information).

[18 December 2008] XtratuM 2.1.0 for LEON2 released

A new version of XtratuM for the LEON2 processor (sparc v8 architecture, without MMU) has been developed. It is a porting to the LEON2 processor with a major redesing to follow the ARINC-653 standard.

This version is the first hypervisor for the sparc v8 architecture. The performance achieved are excellent showing that the hypervisor technology can effectively be used in this processor family.

Now we are improving this version in two axes: 1) performance; and 2) adatation to specific space requirements.