Introducing the Arm RD-1AE Virtual Hardware Platform

This spring, Arm introduced RD-1AE an advanced automotive reference design featuring Neoverse-V3AE application processors as well as Cortex-R82AE based safety islands and a Cortex-M55 based Runtime Security Engine. The release also included a complete set of open source software showcasing the platform's many features.  The RD-1AE is now available as a virtual model on the Arm Virtual Hardware platform powered by Corellium.
Arm RD-1AE Virtual Hardware screenshot

The RD-1AE virtual hardware platform can execute the entirety of Arm's reference software deliverables which include type one hypervisors on the  application cores and safety islands.  For more details on all the software features, check out the Arm RD-1AE page at Arm Developer.

kronos_baremetal_high_level_arch

RD-1AE Virtual Hardware Baremetal Features

The diagram above, taken from the Arm Automotive Solutions page shows the architecture of RD-1AE.  With the exception of the core count for the applications cluster, the virtual hardware platform faithfully represents the entirety of this architecture including SystemReady IR support, trusted services and Arm Trusted Firmware.  The applications core count was reduced to four instead of 16 as listed in the diagram to make the platform more affordable to run.  If you need a platform with more than the four provided, please let us know at support@corellium.com.

kronos_virtualization_high_level_arch (1)

RD-1AE Virtual Hardware Virtualization Features

In addition to supporting all the baremetal features of RD-1AE, the virtual hardware platform also implements the entirety of the RD-1AE virtualization features including the ability to run Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors.  The Arm software package includes the Xen hypervisor. While multiple commercial hypervisors have been validated on Corellium virtual hardware platforms they are not included.  

The execution speed of the platform continues the Corellium tradition for silicon-like performance.  The system boots to a Linux prompt in just under 30 seconds.

Building the Software

The RD-1AE virtual hardware platform executes all the software examples provided by Arm and many of these are available as pre-built images which can be chosen at device creation time.  If you want to build your own versions of the software or if you wish to replace any component with your own, be sure to check out the support page for guidance.  There are a few minor tweaks to the package to increase the available memory and remove PCI devices from the device tree as the model does not contain any PCI devices.  Finally, since the platform is currently running on AWS Graviton 3 instances, the support page also shows how to compile without SVE support.  This limitation will be removed once the platform is migrated to run on Graviton 4 servers.  Stay tuned!

Availability

The RD-1AE virtual hardware platform is available today.  If you don't already have an account you can request a trial here.  If you have an existing Arm ID, you can simply login and access your free trial.  All trial accounts receive 100 free core-hours to use over 30 days. Once you have your account, you can login here.

What's Next?

We're far from finished rolling out auto-focused systems and solutions.  We'll have a number of exciting follow ups coming out in the upcoming months.  Stay tuned!

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