The Linux Foundation today released details of a new hypervisor reference project for scenarios such as the “internet of things” and other embedded devices.

It’s called Project ACRN and it’s made of two central components: the hypervisor itself and also its device model. The creators of the project will also build a Linux-based Service operating system, and the hypervisor will be able to run guest instances of other operating systems simultaneously.

“With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “ACRN’s optimization for resource-constrained devices and focus on isolating safety-critical workloads and giving them priority make the project applicable across many IoT use cases.”

ACRN will likely compete with a second Linux Foundation hypervisor project called the Xen Project, which is also being adapted for automotive and other embedded applications. The Xen Project recently announced that this would be a priority following news that Amazon Web Services Inc. will no longer use it as its first-choice hypervisor.

However, ACRN reckons it has the advantage as it believes that other hypervisors built for data centers are too big and are unable to prioritize certain workloads, which makes them unsuitable for embedded use cases.

In contrast, ACRN is quite small, with just 25,000 lines of code anticipated once it’s completed. That compares with the more than 150,000 lines of code seen in other hypervisors. And ACRN will be able to prioritize certain workloads as the project backers believe this is essential for use cases such as the automotive industry, which it is also targeting.

Notably, one of the main contributors to ACRN is Intel Corp., which has written the majority of its code so far. For now, the hypervisor only runs on some Intel-powered PCs, but the company insisted that it welcomes contributions from others to “build Project ACRN support for a broad collection of architectures and platforms.”

At least for now this does give Xen an advantage, because it can run on pretty much any kind of infrastructure and operating system.

Image: Linux Foundation