VIRTUAL INTEGRATION ENVIRONMENT SOFTWARE
With the pressure on collapsing development schedules, Lynx has worked with its partners and identified three areas of opportunity associated with the creation of LYNX MOSA.ic-based systems:
- Enable software development for Linux and LynxOS-178 without software developers needing to be experts in hypervisor technology. Here, the focus is on functionality as opposed to cycle accuracy
- Developing customer software ahead of target hardware availability
- Harnessing existing customer CI/CD development flows for the creation of LYNX MOSA.ic-based systems
Our Virtual Integration Environment (VIE) product helps enable these capabilities. VIE:
- Provides a disaggregated virtual target infrastructure. LynxOS-178 and Buildroot instances are independent of LynxSecure, supporting QEMU virtual targets for Arm and Intel
- Supports a cloud-based workflow, with current product supporting on-prem use cases. Public cloud support will be added in 2024
- A specific version of VIE is offered as a complementary release to a specific LYNX MOSA.ic for Avionics (MfA) release (Example: MOSA.ic for Avionics 2023.10 and VIE 2023.10)
PRODUCT DETAILS
The diagram to the right shows how the system is configured. The Lynx DevOps Server hosts the Virtual Target Emulator and includes a Linux-hosted QEMU. vSwitch supports the LynxOS-178 RTOS or LynxElement (Unikernel) runtime environments. This provides accurate emulation of POSIX/ANSI calls. Client/Server Lynx Target Services (LTS) utility allows users to create/delete and start/stop LynxOS-178 or Unikernel images. Lynx provides command line interface (CLI) and Python APIs to control this.
To use this package of software, customers:
- Deploy the Lynx DevOps Server with the Virtual Target Emulator and Manager
- Deploy the client side of the Virtual Target Manager on the MfA CDK workstations
- Build LynxOS-178, Unikernel and Buildroot Linux images
- Use the CLI to upload and run the images on the Virtual Target Emulator
- Script the deployment and execution of images on the virtual target for CI/CD
