Hypervisors

Hypervisors have been around for more than 50 years but have recently become important in automotive software development. The main driver for the use of hypervisors is centralized computer controllers, which reduce the required hardware (for example, one SoC instead of two). A more specific use case is for running cluster software and IVI software on the same SoC. We will come back to explaining this use more after some background on hypervisors.

Hypervisors allow separate programs or operating environment running on the same hardware. It creates Virtual Machines (VMs). There are two main types of hypervisors, which are referred to by different names, but one convention is to refer to them as bare metal and hosted. Another convention is to call them type 1 and type 2. Figure 13.10 gives a visual representation of the types of hypervisors:

Figure 13.10 – Visualization of type 1 and type 2 hypervisors

Type 1 is also called bare metal...