Andreas Platschek, OpenTech EDV-Research, Austria
Georg Schiesser, OpenTech EDV-Research, Austria

As virtualization techniques are being used in the automotive industry, in order to save hardware, reduce power consumption and allow the reuse of legacy applications, as well as allow the fast development and integration of new applications, the need for a runtime environment that is suitable and in wide use in the automotive industry emerges. The requirements for such an runtime environment are defined in the most widely used specification in this industry - OSEK/VDX.

One key feature the OVERSEE project is taking advantage of, is that co-locating a OSEK runtime environment and a full-featured GPOS GNU/Linux eliminates many limitations of OSEK/VDX by the extension through virtualization and notably allowing to mitigate some of the serious shortcomings in the security area by resolving these issues at the architectural level rather than trying to patch up the limited OSEK OS. This may well constitute a general trend to specialize operating systems and operate powerful hardware as an assortment of specialized FLOSS systems collaborating to provide different services, including full backwards compatibility to legacy operating systems.

Currently, several FLOSS implementation of this specification are available under different FLOSS license models and with a different degree of compliance. This paper gives an overview of the available implementations, a rational for the chosen implementation as well as a description of the efforts for the migration to XtratuM.