Wind River Blog Network

Teaching Networking using Simics

By Jakob Engblom

Wind River Education Services provides user training for a variety of topics, including Wind River operating systems and tools, as well as more general topics like networking. Training always includes hands-on labs, which can complicate logistics for training sessions. Shipping boards and configuring networks is time-consuming and error-prone. For that reason, we are looking into using Simics as an alternative to physical hardware to streamline training logistics. It also makes it simple to encapsulate configurations, while maintaining the reality of cross-development. In this blog post, we will look at how Simics is used as a tool to facilitate network labs in the context of education.

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Got DPDK? We Can Help You!

By Glenn Seiler

If you’ve purchased a communications processor from Intel in the last year, there is a strong likelihood you are familiar with the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit. Intel DPDK, as it is commonly referred to here at Wind River, is a set of libraries that help applications transmit and receive packet data as efficiently as possible on Intel Xeon multicore processors.  System architects and designers of networking applications can leverage the Intel DPDK to accelerate packets through layer 3 to create a fast path for packets to build high performance applications.  Mastering the fast path opens the door to a world of new high-value intelligent applications like deep packet inspection (DPI), and security.

But mastering the fast path is no easy task.  This can be especially true if you are considering migration from another architecture or protocol stack to take advantage of the increased power of Intel architecture (IA). Nearly every communications company I have talked to over the last few years is starting to consider Intel architecture for data plane applications as well as the traditional applications and control plane typically that IA is used for. The good news is you don’t have to make this transition  alone.  Wind River is now making our team of technical experts available to support any Intel DPDK project regardless of underlying operating system.  Yes, Wind River will support Intel DPDK application development on any Linux whether it is Wind River Linux, your own in-house distribution, or a third party commercial Linux distribution. Check out our latest news.

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Securing Android for the Battle Space

By Tim Skutt

Armed conflict has radically changed.  Remotely operated unmanned vehicles and cyber warfare highlight this change.  Combatants can launch an attack anywhere from a few hundred meters away to half a world away with the same devastating results.  One of the fascinating – and scary – parts of this change is that the trigger firing the weapon has become the Enter key on a keyboard or a finger press on a touchscreen.

Essentially, the geography of the battlefield now includes the mobile devices we carry – whether we carry them into the physical front lines being fought with kinetic weapons, or the virtual front lines that extend to our corporate or even home offices. 

Global defense organizations recognize the value of commercial smart phone and tablet capability for deployment to soldiers in the battlefield, wherever that battlefield may be. The challenge of securing the commercial capability and mobile platform for warfighter use requires end-to-end system threat assessment and incorporating embedded device strategies to minimize cyber-attacks and maintain mission-critical communications.

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Diab Compiler Adding Support for new Infineon TriCore AURIX Microcontrollers

By Graham Morphew

Infineon Technologies recently announced their next generation family of 32-bit TriCore™ microcontrollers for automotive applications.  The new architecture is called AURIX™ (AUtomotive Realtime Integrated neXt generation architecture) and it supports multi-core architectures of up to three independent TriCore CPUs.  The feature set of this new AURIX family is a perfect match for powertrain applications, electric vehicles as well as steering, braking, airbag and advanced driver assistance systems.  The Diab Compiler is used in these same applications because it meets the extreme code optimization needs of these types of applications as developers try to maximize performance within the tight memory constraints of a microcontroller’s on-chip memories.  It is this alignment of target markets that brought Wind River and Infineon together to form a partnership to to ensure the Diab Compiler is highly optimized for TriCore, so that our joint customers can meet the demanding specifications of their OEM customers.

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Security Regulations and the Public/Private Relationship

By AJ Shipley

Last week the U.S. House of Representatives passed a cyber-security bill and sent it on to the Senate.  This got me thinking, what is government’s role in regulating the security requirements of our nation’s critical infrastructure? 

Security's primary goal is to establish a trusted relationship and protect people, products, and services from un-authorized or malicious intent.  When it comes to protecting our nations critical infrastructure that trust is fundamental to society operating in a mutually beneficial manner.  When that trust breaks down our society stops operating in a mutually productive way and we all suffer the consequences.  The air travel restrictions immediately following the September 11th attacks and the financial crisis of the 1920's and 2000's are prime examples of what happens when trust is replaced by fear.

Many believe that the market will self regulate itself in the absence of any incentives one way or the other.  But as a security professional, I believe that we must be proactive when it comes to protecting our nation’s critical infrastructure.  Security is a balancing act between business imperatives and security imperatives and finding the correct balance is very complex, and requires a deep expertise and a thorough understanding of the vulnerability landscape.  Unfortunately, for many companies, security is often viewed as an additional business expense.  When expenses are minimized, security suffers, and our infrastructure is put at risk.

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Forcing Rare Bugs to Appear - an Interview with Tingting Yu

By Jakob Engblom

One use of Simics that has always been fascinating is to use the power you have over the target to somehow force error conditions in software. The hardware state control inherent in a tool like Simics should be useful to knock a system off of the expected common path and into code less tested, and to reveal bugs that normally only appear in particular rare circumstances.  Recently, there was a paper published that discussed exactly such an application of Simics.  In this blog post, I will be interviewing Tingting Yu from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln (UNL) about her paper.

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Industrial Automation and the Cloud

By Alexander Damisch

We’re hearing so much about the cloud lately – and I get asked often what cloud computing means in the context of industrial automation and about the benefits delivered, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the cloud as it pertains to industrial automation.  It's a topic I recently covered in a Q&A session for the Intel Embedded Community.

As embedded devices are increasingly connected to the enterprise, arguably the most cost-effective way to implement these systems is via cloud architecture. Within industrial automation, clear targets for a cloud architecture are typical IT components like manufacturing execution systems (MES) and production planning systems (PPS).  There is no need for discrete servers in industrial automation environments that perform functions for only a few machines or manufacturing processes, when they can be performed as cloud services, and thus operated more efficiently.

In industrial automation, the shift to cloud computing is causing a disruption in the embedded space by changing key paradigms regarding data and the location of intelligence.  Specifically, the cloud is affecting the architecture of IT structures (moving from a fixed client server architecture, to a distributed architecture with local and global intelligence), and it is also impacting machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in the embedded cloud. 

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Improving Embedded Operating System Security Part 6: Harden the System Against Attack

By Bill Graham

In the previous posts I’ve discussed various steps that need to be taken in order to improve security, but these are all preventative measures that require validation before a device is ready for market. Enabling the security features of your embedded OS is the first step, but it’s important to test the system continuously throughout development. The importance of security-focused testing can’t be over-emphasized. Testing for security is a different activity than functional testing since the aim is to find and exploit vulnerabilities, often outside the realm of normal operation. Test automation is essential in order to do efficient and thorough security testing. Take a look at a post on this from my colleague Ido Sarig.

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Getting Code Coverage with LDRA Tools on Simics

By Jakob Engblom

A system development tool like Simics is rarely used completely on its own. Simics is usually brought in by companies and development teams who are already using a variety of tools and expect to keep doing so along with Simics. Also, Simics by itself cannot reasonably be expected to solve all problems for all people. Instead, we need to connect Simics with outside tools to provide an integrated solution.

In this blog post, Jay Thomas of LDRA and I will discuss one concrete example of such a tool integration. In particular, how Simics can be used together with the code coverage and certification tools from LDRA to perform code analysis on safety-critical software in a way that is more efficient than with most hardware platforms.

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How Are You Reducing Radiation?

By Pete MacKay

A few years back the FDA launched an initiative aimed at reducing radiation exposure in patients undergoing CT scans.  Clearly there are concerns with exposing the human body to ionizing radiation, and due to the prevalence and popularity of these imaging techniques the FDA feels they are in a position to ensure proactive steps are taken to minimize exposure.  They cite studies done in 2009 showing this total exposure to have nearly doubled in two decades in the US population.

Several factors come into play with cause and effect here, and the FDA is exploring several different perspectives.  Preventative measures start with educating patients, clinicians, and technicians, and altering approaches to therapy planning and the decision process around imaging studies.  The emergence of highly connected health enterprises (and society in general) enables a proposal to track cumulative dosage using tools like a national dosage registry and a patient medical imaging record – who knows, maybe just like Fido runs around with a chip in his neck we might all someday be implanted with a dosimeter along with our medical record?  Kidding aside, the obvious place to start with dosage reduction is with the device manufacturers themselves.

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