ACRN hypervisor is a type-1 bare metal open-source hypervisor, supports multi-VM configurations, and with Zephyr’s efficient memory management and small footprint, it is ideal as a single-core Real-Time Virtual Machine (RTVM) on multi-core CPUs. This setup allows ACRN to manage combination of both general purpose VMs and Zephyr RTVM, each running its own instances, leveraging multi-core architecture for better performance and isolation. This is especially beneficial for industrial mixed critical workloads consolidation requiring reliability, real-time performance, and resource isolation. Zephyr’s support for industrial automation includes precise timing, secure boot, and over-the-air updates, ensuring reliable operation in demanding environments. Its scalability and cross-architecture support make it suitable for various industrial IoT applications, from factory automation to smart grids.

Zephyr v3.7 as RTVM on ACRN forIntel® Processor N-series now includes a reference implementation Ethernet driver for Intel® i226 Ethernet controller, enabling low-latency jitter and cycle-time communication for time-sensitive applications. This is especially important for various motion control use cases such as stationary robotic interpolation tasks, enhancing smooth and accurate movements. The low-latency capabilities of the Intel® i226, combined with Zephyr’s real-time performance, make it ideal for consolidating workloads through type-1 hypervisor such as ACRN for use cases like industrial robotics control, HMI, and automation systems on a single multi-core CPU platform. This integration enhances the efficiency and reliability of industrial or robotic operations, allowing for more responsive and precise control in complex environments.

• New Hypervisor features, such as supporting Celadon for Android-based scenarios, virtualized performance and thermal controls, and redefining the characteristics of the Service VM for supporting additional scenarios and use cases
• New I/O Virtualization features, such as Guest S3 support, virtio-blk performance improvements (including more efficient image formats), notifications of VM events, and TPM virtualization to support security use cases
• A new long-term project enabling the ACRN Hypervisor on RISC-V architecture.

Take a look at the updated ACRN Open Source Roadmap for more details.

What’s New in v3.2

In this v3.2 release, we’ve enabled a new generation of Intel® processors, added configuration of processor performance (frequency) policy, updated how ACRN is packaged for target installation, and updated to the latest LTS version of Ubuntu used as the Service VM.

If you have feedback on these changes or other aspects of ACRN, please share them on the ACRN users mailing list.

Enabling New Generation Intel® Processors

ACRN v3.2 release now supports 12th Generation Intel® Atom N-Series Processors (formerly code-named Alder Lake N) and 13th Generation Intel® Core Mobile and Desktop Processors (formerly code-named Raptor Lake) with real-time SKUs.

Hypervisor-Managed Processor Performance Policy Controls

The ACRN hypervisor Configurator now provides processor performance policy control for CPU frequency if the system supports hardware-controlled performance states (HWP). This ensures that loaded CPUs can run at least at their guaranteed frequency level. Read more in the ACRN Configurator Tool and Scenario Configuration Options documents.

New Debianization Solution for ACRN

The v3.2 release provides a standardized approach for ACRN debianization. We provide an option to build each component as a separate Debian package and allow users to select the binary to deploy at package installation time. Users can also reselect the binary by reconfiguring the installed package.

Service VM Upgraded to use Ubuntu 22.04

The v3.2 release upgrades the Service VM OS from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04.

See the full v3.2 release notes and documentation for more information about this release, including fixed and known issues.

What’s New in v3.1

Release v3.0 featured a new ACRN Configurator UI tool with a more intuitive design and workflow that simplifies getting the setup for the ACRN hypervisor right. With this v3.1 release, we’ve continued making improvements to the Configurator including more comprehensive error checking with more developer-friendly messages. You’ll also see additional advanced configuration settings for tuning real-time performance including Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) and vCPU affinity. Read more in the ACRN Configurator Tool and Scenario Configuration Options documents.

If you have feedback on this, or other aspects of ACRN, please share them on the ACRN users mailing list.

As with the v3.0 release, we’ve simplified installation of the Configurator by providing a Debian package that you can download from the ACRN v3.1 tag assets and install. See the Getting Started Guide for more information.

Improved Board Inspector Collection and Reporting

You run the ACRN Board Inspector tool to collect information about your target system’s processors, memory, devices, and more. The generated board XML file is used by the ACRN Configurator to determine which ACRN configuration options are possible, as well as possible values for target system resources. The v3.1 Board Inspector has improved scanning and provides more messages about potential issues or limitations of your target system that could impact ACRN configuration options.

The Board Inspector is updated to probe beyond CPUID information for Cache Allocation Technology (CAT) support and also detects availability of L3 CAT by accessing the CAT MSRs directly. Read more in Board Inspector Tool.

Sample Application with Two Post-Launched VMs

With this v3.1 release, we provide a follow-on Sample Application User Guide to the Getting Started Guide. This sample application shows how to create two VMs that are launched on your target system running ACRN. One VM is a real-time VM running cyclictest, an open-source application commonly used to measure latencies in real-time systems. This real-time VM (RT_VM) uses inter-VM shared memory (IVSHMEM) to send data to a second Human-Machine Interface VM (HMI_VM) that formats and presents the collected data as a histogram on a web page shown by a browser. This guide shows how to configure, create, and launch the two VM images that make up this application. Full code for the sample application is provided in the acrn-hypervisor GitHub repo misc/sample_application.

Multiple-Displays Support for VMs

The virtio-gpu mechanism is enhanced to support VMs with multiple displays.

Improved TSC Frequency Reporting

The hypervisor now reports Time Stamp Counter (TSC) frequency in KHz so that VMs can get that number without calibrating to a high precision timer.

See the full v3.1 release notes and documentation for more information about this release, including fixed and known issues.

We are delighted to announce that the first Intel® 12th Gen Core CPU (formerly known as Alder Lake) systems from ASRock Industrial are now supported by ACRN and available to the open source community.

12th Gen Intel® Core desktop processors are the first Intel® Core processors to feature performance hybrid architecture for industrial embedded use. It combines two new core microarchitectures, Performance-cores (P-cores) and Efficient-cores (E-cores), on a single processor die. The integrated GPU (iGPU) features enhanced graphics performance for graphics virtualization through Single Root I/O Virtualization (SRIOV), fast Artificial Intelligence (AI) with hardware acceleration and Intel® Xe Architecture and last but not least Real-Time Capabilities such as Intel® Time Coordinated Computing (Intel® TCC) and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) that help ensure smooth operation across multiple edge devices in industrial implementations.

In order to provide a seamless experience, the ACRN team has validated two systems for basic functionality based on ACRN v3.0 and above. For further information about these systems, please refer to the URLs below:

For the complete list of platforms supported by ACRN, visit: https://projectacrn.github.io/latest/reference/hardware.html

What’s New in v3.0

The ACRN v3.0 release offers a major developer experience update including a new Configurator UI simplifying setup for the hypervisor and VMs, adds additional supported hardware for industrial use cases, Debian packaging, and new features and enhancements.

Redesigned ACRN Configuration

We heard your feedback: ACRN configuration is difficult, confusing, and had too many parameters that were not easy to understand. Release v3.0 features a new ACRN Configurator UI tool with a more intuitive design and workflow that simplifies getting the setup for the ACRN hypervisor right. You’ll also see changes for configuring individual VMs. We’ve greatly reduced the number of parameters needing your attention, organized them into basic and advanced categories, provided practical defaults, and added error checking so you can be much more confident in your configuration before building ACRN. This is our first major step of continued ACRN user experience improvements.

Commercial off-the-shelf Tiger Lake machine support

The Vecow SPC-7100 system is validated and supported by ACRN. This is a commercially available 11th Generation Intel® Core Processor (codenamed Tiger Lake) from Vecow.

A Windows User VM can now shut down or reset the system gracefully.

This supports a community-requested user model where a Windows-based VM provides a system management interface that includes being abot to shut the system down or restart.

Real Time Clock (RTC)

Each VM now has its own PC/AT-compatible RTC/CMOS device emulated by the hypervisor. With this, we can avoid any sudden jump in a VM’s system clock that may confuse certain applications.

ACRN Debianization

We appreciate a big contribution from the ACRN community! Helmut Buchsbaum from TTTech Industrial submitted a “debianization” feature that lets developers build and package ACRN into several Debian packages, install them on the target Ubuntu or Debian OS, and reboot the machine with ACRN running.

See the full v3.0 release notes and documentation for more information about this release, including fixed and known issues.

Here are just a few key highlights from the last year:

• First Technical Steering Committee (TSC) meeting (Dec 2021):
  Read the meeting minutes on the TSC mailing list archive.
• Two-day virtual meetup Europe registers 350 developers (May 2021):
  Read more and revisit the presentations listed in the Virtual Meet-Up Europe Wrap-up Blog post.
• ACRN Orchestration support for smart factory at Embedded World (Apr 2021):
  Read more and rewatch the session video in this Blog.
• ACRN Hypervisor Service Module upstreamed to Linux Kernel 5.12 (March 2021):
  Read more in this Blog.

Congratulations to the ACRN community.
Happy Birthday, and here’s to the many birthdays yet to come!