SAN JOSE, Calif. — Wind River officially rolls out virtualization software optimized for its VxWorks and Linux environments across a broad range of embedded markets. The news comes less than ten days after Intel Corp. bid to acquire Wind River.

Wind River joins a crowd of vendors selling embedded virtualization software. They include Green Hills Software, LynuxWorks, Open Kernel Labs, Real Time Systems GmbH, SYSGO AG, TenAsys, VirtualLogix and VMware, according to VDC Research.

The Wind River Hypervisor uses less than ten thousand lines of code. That could keep performance overhead to less than three percent of CPU resources and ease the job of certifying the code for applications in areas such as aerospace.

"We map I/O into the guest environment directly so it can directly talk to data registers to get higher performance," said Tomas Evensen, chief technology officer of Wind River.

The first release only supports VxWorks and Wind River Linux on Power and x86 processors. However, it does include an application programming interface so developers can port the hypervisor to their in-house operating systems.

The Wind River Workbench development tools suite has been extended to support developing software that runs on the hypervisor.

The hypervisor is available now for an up-front fee and per device royalties based on negotiations. It is already being used by beta customers include Hughes Networks which employs it as a boot-up environment for an automotive dashboard.

Interest in virtualization has taken off in embedded markets with the rise of embedded multicore processors, Evensen said. The hypervisor can support symmetric and asymmetric multiprocessing techniques, he added.

Evensen said it will be about two months until Intel's acquisition of Wind River closes and the two companies have more details to share on the merger.