Service Architecture#

As part of the NVIDIA DRIVE AGX™ Platform, the NVIDIA virtualization solution provides a framework of Foundation Services that aggregate guest operating system agnostic software and firmware components for use with automotive components.

Foundation Services#

The NVIDIA virtualization solution takes advantage of microkernel technology that enables a minimal amount of software to run in the CPU supervisory mode. The following virtualization services run in this mode:

  • Time partitioning and scheduling.

  • Space partitioning for access to memory.

  • Inter-process communication between operating systems.

  • Real-time automotive AUTOSAR applications.

  • Real-time and deterministic GPU-sharing for graphics.

Additionally, the NVIDIA virtualization configuration solution provides:

  • Isolation

  • Parallelism

  • Safety

  • Robustness

  • Performance

Platform Virtualization Architecture#

The following diagram shows the platform virtualization architecture. image1

Each component in the architecture is explained as follows.

Component

Description

Guest OS

Allocates peripherals that Guest OS needs to control.

Services

Services for NVIDIA DRIVE® Update.

Virtualized Servers

See Virtualization Servers for details.

Hypervisor

Trusted Software server that separates the system into partitions. Each partition can contain an operating system or a bare-metal application. The Hypervisor manages:

  • Guest OS partitions and the isolation between them

  • Partitions’ virtual views of the CPU and memory resources

  • Hardware interactions

  • Run-lists

  • Channel recovery

Hypervisor is optimized to run on the ARMv8.2 Architecture.

Bootloader

Firmware that runs during boot to load firmware components, such as boot images, partition images, and other firmware.

Trusted OS

Trusted OS configuration in the PCT describes the configuration of the virtual Trusted OS device.

NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin™ SoC

System on a Chip hardware resources.

Virtualized Servers#

The virtualized configurable servers are as follows. Additional information for other servers is planned for a future release.

Server Name

Description

System Manager

Provides high-level coordination of the System and Partition State Transitions, including:

  • System Boot

  • System Shutdown

  • System Restart

  • VM Boot

  • VM Shutdown

  • VM Restart

  • VM Halt

  • VM Unhalt

Boot and Power Manager Processor (BPMP) Server

Facilitates communication between Guest OS Virtual Machines (VM) and BPMP firmware.

Virtual Machine (VM) Server

host1X virtualizes NvHost.

Storage Server

Para-virtualizes storage access to enable sharing physical storage devices among multiple Guest OS Virtual Machines (VM).

Security Engine (SE) Server

Para-virtualizes and allows multiple Guest OS Virtual Machines (VM) access to the security engine cryptographic hardware accelerator.

Display

Display has a Server component and a Guest component. The Display Server runs on DCE-FW and CCPLEX and handles sharing of display between multiple Guest OS Virtual Machines. The Guest component is a para-virtualized display client driver running inside of each Guest OS Virtual Machine that has display support.

GPU

Runs on top of the virtualization core and handles sharing of GPU between multiple client Guest OS Virtual Machines. The GPU virtualization also includes the para-virtualized GPU client driver running inside of each Guest OS Virtual Machine.

Trusted Applications (TA)

Through Trusted Applications, Trusted OS exposes a set of core services that use managed security assets in cryptographic operations without exposing them to non-secure guest software.

Debug Server

Provides support for kernel-level debugging of Guest OS Virtual Machines (VM).
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