Green Hills enhances secure networking platform

Green Hills's approach to system virtualisation enables a complete Linux operating system and its applications ecosystem to securely and seamlessly co-exist with the performance, reliability-critical and real-time portions of networking devices - all on a single general-purpose microprocessor.

System availability is increased by eliminating the possibility for a non-critical application failure or corruption in the Linux environment to compromise the critical real-time packet traffic applications and services running on the Integrity RTOS.

Integrity, a Common Criteria EAL6+ certified operating system technology, assures high availability and secure isolation between networking subsystems.

The Integrity advanced-security architecture prevents denial-of-service attacks while guaranteeing optimal real-time performance for packet processing applications.

At the Embedded Systems Conference Silicon Valley 2009, Green Hills Software will demonstrate the application of its Platform for Secure Networking to a new reference design: the Fulcrum Microsystems Vegas 48-port 1Gbit Ethernet switch chip reference system.

The Vegas reference platform consists of the Green Hills Platform for Secure Networking, including GateD - a solution for commercial-grade routing and switching software.

Using Green Hills's secure virtualisation architecture, a standard Linux operating system will execute on the Freescale MPC8548 general-purpose processor of the reference platform, providing system management functionality and other services.

Green Hills's Integrity RTOS provides the secure isolation of the Linux environment from the real-time routing and packet processing functions, which execute as native Integrity applications on the same general-purpose processor.

Integrity RTOS's ultra-fast interprocess communications (IPC) enable the Linux and Integrity applications to rapidly exchange management information.