User:Gilles maigne/sandbox

Harman Hypervisor is a type-1 hypervisor providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by VirtualLogix and is now being developed by the Harman International.

History
Harman Hypervisor originated as a development project at VirtualLogix by the former ChorusOS team.

In 2002 an initial investigation consisted of running Solaris within a thread of the Chorus micro-kernel on a PC, this experiment showed that it was possible to run concurrently with good performance multiple operating system together.

In 2003, the team made a second investigation consisting of running Linux kernel with a Chorus OS, this second experiments lead to a first commercial product named Jaluna-2. In 2005, the Hypervisor team decided to separate the Guest OS scheduler and resource provisioning from ChorusOS, leading to the creation of a standalone Hypervisor software component, named "OSware". Initially the "OSware" included the following features:


 * Guest OS scheduling
 * Real-time based scheduler allowing to keep real-time  capability of one Guest Operating System
 * Inter-VM communication with specific hyper-call interface
 * A virtual PIC (programmable interrupt controller)
 * An interface for para-virtualizing the Guest OSes
 * Initial port on Intel platform supported strong Guest OS isolation based on Intel security ring

In 2006 OSware 2.0 included the port on the ARM architecture and a Fair-share scheduling algorithm, and a set of Virtual device driver aiming at sharing disk, network.

In 2007 OSware was rebranded "VLX". VLX 3.0 included support of Intel VT as well as PowerPC port. In 2008, VLX 3.2 On ARM platform, included a new component named the "isolator" allowing to strongly separate Guest OS on ARM based hardware. Indeed in previous version of the Hypervisor Guest Operating System were running in Supervisor mode, this allowed VM to access memory of other Guest OS by reprogramming MMU. The isolator module ran Guest Operating System in User Mode. In 2010 VLX 4.0.1 included new functionality for supporting multi-core processor and Intel VT-d. New para-virtualized devices were added allowing to share physical display, keyboard and touch screen between multiple Guest Operating System. In 2011 VLM 5.1 included support of ARM virtualization extension for Cortex A15 based platform. In 2012 VLX was rebranded VLM. VLM supported virtualization of the GPU, multimedia and camera, allowing to run Android on a full virtual platform. Since 2015, Harman Hypervisor has been adapted to the automotive market and certified to Automotive Safety Integrity Level B.

Supported Architecture
Latest version supports ARMv8-A and Intel architecture. Former version supported Power-PC platform.

Main features
Harman Hypervisor supports:
 * 32 and 64 bits processor architecture (Cortex-A15, Cortex-A72 and Intel architecture)
 * VM isolation by using hardware accelerated virtualization (Intel-VT and ARM Virtualization extension) and DMA protection with Intel VTD or ARM System MMU
 * Multi-core Operating System
 * Pinning of virtual CPUs
 * Migration of Virtual CPUs, for taking advantage inactive physical CPUs
 * Real-time capabilities including both real time scheduling and bounded interrupt latency.
 * Ability to assign physical (peripherals, memory) resources to any Guest OS
 * VM control features including the ability to start, pause, shutdown and restart the Virtual Machine
 * Power-management features including VCPU hot plug and hot unplug as well and Suspend To Ram
 * Inter-VM communication facilities which are used to implement split virtual device drivers
 * Memory granting/revocation allowing to efficiently transmit memory buffers
 * Safety oriented features like virtual watchdog, logging, interrupt throttling
 * VirtIO devices
 * Introspection features allowing to examine the state of a virtual machine for debugging or security purposes