Wind River Blog Network

What Exactly are You Testing, and How?

By Emeka Nwafor

"What exactly are you testing? How are you testing it?"

I'm sure that these are amongst the questions that product, business, and technical managers across the embedded software industry have asked themselves on several occasions throughout their careers. I know I have.

The importance of testing embedded software isn't new. In my "youth", I remember our VP of Product Development circulating a white paper that discussed the devastating impact resulting from the deployment of an untested "simple" patch to some switching software and declaring that "this cannot happen to us".

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A&D Regional Conferences

By Paul Parkinson

I've recently finished updating presentations on The Essentials of Multicore Software and Challenges of Security Software Development for our forthcoming Aerospace & Defence Conferences which we are holding across Europe in November.

It's been interesting to think about how multicore can be used in technology refreshes and applied to new programmes. I'm looking forward to discussing these issues with customers, as well as understanding their security requirements, particularly as the need for interoperability continues to grow.

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Busting the Myths around VxWorks #6: Safety

By Bill Graham

Software safety is related to many factors but I think the impression that an operating system is unreliable conjures up the perception it is unsafe as well. I’ve spent time in other posts dispelling myths surrounding VxWorks reliability. Rather than repeat myself I’ll point to my previous post on reliability – the points made there, apply here too. The proof point for the safety of VxWorks lies in the success of our customers.

VxWorks supports three of the most important and stringent safety standards in the world. Firstly for the commercial and military avionics market we have VxWorks ARINC 653 and VxWorks DO-178B.

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G.hn, does it get the crown for in-home networking?

By Nikhil Chauhan

The new buzzword in wired networking is G.hn, pronounced as "G dot hn".

I know, it does add another word to the alphabet soup of technologies, but I do think that it solves a fundamental lingering problem.

Our homes have various types of wiring available today; these constitute power, cable, phone, etc. The problem is that all of these satisfy their own purposes. The technologies today are fragmented; big time! There are MOCA (adopted in Verizon's fiber network) and HomePNA (AT&T's U-Verse network is based on this) that use coaxial wiring for CPE devices.

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Busting the Myths Around VxWorks #5: Security

By Bill Graham

In reality this isn’t a myth, it’s more of an awareness problem. Our solution for the need for high robustness systems is the VxWorks MILS product. VxWorks MILS is designed to provide Multiple independent Levels of Security (MLS), a security concept that ensures that complete separation is provided between secure and non-secure portions of a system (and that it is impossible to subvert this to gain access to the classified partition in the system from the non-secure). 

We have designed the MILS product to conform to the separation kernel protection profile as defined by the Common Criteria (aka ISO 15408) and is currently undergoing official certification to Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+.

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Addressing Core Issues

By Mark Hermeling

A good article from colleague Jens Wiegand on multicore in medical devices. Jens talks about consolidation and innovation, two driving factors in both medical and industrial devices. However, he also points out the flip side of the coin: certification. Virtualization can help provide strong separation on multicore, which makes certification manageable (the article goes into more depth).

Jens also touches on tooling for multicore development, an often-overlooked and under appreciated aspect. A single development environment that can be used to develop the entire device (real-time, UI, kernels, userland) as well as drive testing and debugging is a must to create highly efficient development teams.

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Quit Bugging Me: Memory Leak!

By Mike Deliman

A perennial question arises... "Did I find a memory leak in the shell?  See what it does?"

This question naturally arises after a customer has been debugging a while, and runs short on memory for some allocation.  They check into it, and they find that when they call certain shell functions, they find memory missing after the call.

Here are typical examples of "memory leaks" from the shell...

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Busting the Myths around VxWorks #4: VxWorks reliability

By Bill Graham

I don’t think we are promoting the reliability of our products well enough. In particular, a key attribute and value of VxWorks is its reliability. Being a newcomer to Wind River my colleagues here were surprised to hear that the reliability of VxWorks would have been called into question. Being on the inside, of course, I am now aware of the various proof points regarding VxWorks’ reliability:

• VxWorks has been built into over a billion devices.  VxWorks has been in more devices than any other RTOS and been on the market for more than 20 years.  Assuming linear growth and at least 25% of these devices are still on the market, VxWorks has over 2 Trillion (2x1012) hours in operation (that is 250 million years!)

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Wind River’s Next Chapter

By Ken Klein

It’s been roughly 90 days since Wind River became a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel, and I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you the state of our business and a few personal thoughts of mine in what marks my inaugural contribution to the Wind River Blog Network.

Let me begin by saying what an exciting road it has been. This has been one of the most frenetic years in recent memory. Just last month I returned from visits to many of our offices in North America, Europe and Asia. During those visits I was reassured that our employees understand and embrace the Intel acquisition. Of course, there were lots of questions and luckily I had answers to most of them. Personally, I’m ecstatic with the transition to Intel’s Software and Services Group. We closed the acquisition in near record time, in just six weeks, allowing us to avoid distraction. Since then, we’ve made significant progress in identifying alignment opportunities, and establishing clear rules of engagement and business metrics.

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A Legacy Of Titans

By Mike Deliman

PASADENA, Calif. – NASA's Galileo spacecraft began what would become a 14-year odyssey of exploration 20 years ago this Sunday, Oct. 18. Galileo was humanity's first emissary to orbit a planet in the outer solar system – Jupiter. (Read More) 

20 years ago I was just starting to work with a remarkably small, very unix-like kernel from this *tiny* company in Emeryville (near Berkeley).  You could run it with a 68020SBC and a single 2MB memory board, a computer costing perhaps only twenty thousand dollars.  It was incredibly fast (considering the hardware) and even supported networking.  It was called VxWorks, and it just came out with a "Wind" kernel.  Back then, no-one was talking much about sending commercial off-the-shelf stuff into space.

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