Elisa is a consortium to work in safety-critical systems. It is organised in working groups around technologies and around verticals (aerospace, automotive and medical devices).
Elisa defines a workflow that involves prototyping on Xen in a simulation environment. An essential aspect is reproducibility – which is something usually lacking when making demonstrators. Now, they want to extend this into actual hardware.
One issue is selecting the hardware. It must be able to run Xen, including graphics. They started with Renesas RCAR 3.0, which has good support in Xen. However, it requires proprietary licenses to use, nd the boards are not easy to obtain. Now they shifted to Xilinx ZynqMP and Ultrascale. It has good, fully open source Xen support and documentation. However, ZCU102 graphics are not hanlded by Xen. RPi was also considered but it doesn’t have the hardware support for XEN security. i.MX8 has good Xen support, but no community support.
They demonstrate running Petalinux (Xilinx’ yocto-based distro) running together with Apertis (Debian) and Zephyr on top of Xen (built from Petalinux as well).