Virtualization of the Legacy VxWorks Application onto the Linux Platform

Abstract

With the expansion in the deliverables by the IT industries, the smart organizations are deploying virtualization in an increased manner which helps to reduce the capital expenses and make the business operations more active, agile, and affiliated with the organization’s business requirements. While an application needs to be upgraded, the virtualization comes into picture which results in application to be hardware independent and share the same set of resources with other applications running on the same virtual platform. A detailed study is made on the architectural details of VxWorks RTOS, Linux operating system, and the migration architecture. Further, the detailed procedure for migrating a legacy VxWorks application to a 32-bit embedded Linux platform has been explained. Subsequently, the steps for porting it to the 64-bit Linux platform has been detailed. Observations show the major changes to be updated in the VxWorks application to work on the Linux OS. It can be said that the OS abstraction layer can be considered as the floating layer which needs a major part of the changes to be made when porting an application from one platform to another.

Keywords: Embedded linux, Hardware virtualization, Migration, Virtualization, VxWorks to linux, VxWorks RTOS.

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