Modern embedded systems increasingly need to run software with different levels of criticality on the same hardware, without compromising isolation, determinism, or safety. Hypervisors can provide the strong separation these systems require, but their role in resource-constrained, safety-critical environments is quite different from virtualization in the cloud or data center.

Enter Eclipse ZoneX, a new lightweight hypervisor in the Eclipse ThreadX ecosystem. This talk will introduce the fundamentals of embedded hypervisors and explain why hardware-enforced isolation is becoming increasingly important for safety-critical and mixed-criticality applications. We will then explore ZoneX: the problems it is designed to solve, how it complements ThreadX, and why it represents an important addition to the ThreadX suite. Along the way, we will examine selected code to make its programming model and integration with ThreadX concrete.

We will also step back from the individual components to look at the broader safety-critical embedded ecosystem taking shape at the Eclipse Foundation, and how ThreadX and ZoneX relate to initiatives such as OpenHW and the Trustable Software Framework (TSF).

In this session, you will learn what embedded hypervisors bring to safety-critical systems, understand where ZoneX fits alongside ThreadX, and gain a clearer picture of how Eclipse projects are coming together to support open, dependable, safety-critical embedded platforms.

OCX Webinar Week - A Guided Tour of Eclipse ZoneX