The Linux Foundation has announced the ACRN (pronounced “Acorn”) Project, an effort to develop a reference hypervisor for the Internet of Things (IoT) in the face of existing solutions being too bulky and unwieldy for embedded use.

“With project ACRN, embedded developers have a new, immediately available hypervisor option,” claims Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “ACRN’s optimisation for resource-constrained devices and focus on isolating safety-critical workloads and giving them priority make the project applicable across many IoT use cases. We’re pleased to welcome project ACRN and invite embedded developers to get involved in the new community.”

“ACRN will have a Linux-based service OS and the ability to simultaneously run multiple types of guest operating systems providing a powerful solution for workload consolidation,” adds Imad Sousou, corporate vice president and general manager of the Open Source Technology Centre at Intel, of the technology his company has donated to the project. “This new project delivers a flexible, lightweight hypervisor, designed to take real-time and safety-critical concerns into consideration and drive meaningful innovation for the IoT space.”

Project ACRN, which includes a hypervisor and a device model, is available now at the official website under a custom licence which allows for modification and redistribution in source or binary forms providing Intel’s copyright notice is kept intact.