Some technologies, it seems to me, should not really exist. They do, however, because they address a specific need. Typically, such technologies stretch something to make it perform in a way that was not originally intended. An example would be the fax machine. In a paper-based office environment, there was a frequent need to move documents from A to B. Initially, this resulted in the mail. But fax was an ingenious way to use phone lines to deliver a similar result. As soon as email became widespread, fax disappeared almost overnight.

The technology that I have in mind today is hypervisors, which are a software layer that enables multiple operating systems to be run simultaneously on a single hardware platform. They have been used for decades on mainframes, more recently on desktop computers, but are now beginning to be very relevant to embedded developers … (more…)