Wind River Blog Network

Top Ten Reasons to Trust Your Business to Wind River Linux - Part 1

By Bill Graham

At Wind River, we definitely believe the business case for using commercial embedded Linux is clear. In fact, we’ve come up with some top reasons why you can trust your next embedded Linux project to Wind River. We’ll review our top ten list over the next three blog posts. Additionally, you can find  the full list here. Let’s look at the first 4 reasons below, and you’ll no doubt see the diversity and strength Wind River Linux brings to the market. 

1) Yocto Project Compatible, cross-architecture, market-leading commercial embedded Linux platform: As the maintainer of key components to the Yocto Project, Wind River is a leader and dedicated contributor to the open source community. The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration that provides standardized high-quality infrastructure, tools, and methodology to help decrease the complexity and increase the portability of Linux implementations. Providing a common build system and core technologies, the Yocto Project is providing an open, community-led approach to embedded Linux. This is great for our customers because there is an ecosystem of vendors basing their products on Yocto preventing vendor lock-in and proprietary approaches. Leading partners in Yocto include Intel, Texas Instruments, LSI Corporation, Juniper Networks, Freescale Semiconductor, Cavium Networks and many others.

2) Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) add-on solutions: Wind River Open Virtualization Profile is the first open source virtualization product that can support hardware consolidation with extremely low latency and high throughput running on standard hardware. It solves the challenges of new network service deployment time constraints, data traffic growth scalability, and budget limitations while remaining true to the spirit of open source. Network Function Virtualization has become a reality due to the low overhead that Open Virtualization Profile provides. Read more about this in our whitepaper.

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Intelligent Platforms for Intelligent Industries

By Santhosh Nair

Today we introduced the latest version of our software platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) – Wind River Intelligent Device Platform (IDP). IDP is targeted at gateways and hubs, providing connectivity, manageability, security and intelligence that  enables companies to kick start building applications that will monitor, track and course-correct your machines and systems.

When discussing IDP, it’s important to add some context to illustrate the value that this solution delivers.

The Internet is the single biggest revolution in this century. You have seen how the enterprise, consumer and mobile businesses have evolved in the last two decades.  However, industrial businesses have not yet fully leveraged the power of the Internet to create new efficiencies in the market. Industrial businesses support critical infrastructure, commerce and public health, and they are built on technology and business models that aren’t as efficient as they could be.  These inefficiencies can translate to large operational costs and waste – primarily because these industries are very capital intensive.  Technology has the ability to revolutionize industrial businesses. This is best summarized by General Electric in their Industrial Internet white paper where they discuss “the power of 1%”. Basically, GE puts a $ value to 1% efficiency that can be realized in different markets like aerospace, rail operations, oil & gas, healthcare and infrastructure. 

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Openstack…the next big thing!

By Davide Ricci

Continuing our ongoing efforts to advance open source innovation, Wind River is keeping busy with new OpenStack activities.

Wind River has spent years of hard work in the Linux space to further grow adoption and innovation across the embedded industry. Add to that, we’ve contributed to the inception and development of an open ecosystem for building Linux devices with the creation of the Yocto Project. Most recently, we’ve also delivered an open virtualization technology that enhances KVM and brings it to new levels of performance and scalability to boost its adoption in rapidly changing markets. 

Now, Wind River working on the next big thing – OpenStack. Our customers can look to us to bridge the enterprise world with the embedded one - starting from networking core and edge devices - and we're up to the challenge! For more information, check out a recent development shared with the Yocto Project mailing list below:

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A Practical Approach to the Internet of Things

The market opportunities around the Internet of Things (IoT) are substantial for Intel,  McAfee, Wind River, along with their ecosystem and the industry at large. But in a practical sense, how should businesses approach IoT? How can they start optimizing their processes and how do they ensure security? I recently caught up with a couple of experts to find out: Adam Burns, Director of Strategic Planning and Business Development of Intelligent Solutions at Intel, and Santhosh Nair, General Manager, Intelligent Systems Group at Wind River. Check out their great insights below, along with a video of Adam discussing the opportunities and a very cool IoT Infographic from Wind River. Let me know how you’re approaching IoT. – Valerie Scarsellato, aka @Intel_Chick, Marketing Specialist, ISG

Val: So, first things first, how should businesses approach IoT?

Adam Burns: I think the first thing really for businesses to think about is the top business problem they want to solve. What are they going to do to get meaning out of their data and what business problem is it solving for them? Given that, they should ask what systems they need to connect and instrument or what new capabilities to put in place to optimize or even transform their business.

 

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Fighting Crime with SE Android

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I read a BBC News story (Met Police technology 'ineffective and outdated') about how the Metropolitan Police force in London, UK was being hampered in its fight against crime by out of date technologies. The news story discussed the London Assembly report (PDF) which highlighted the fact that most police officers had smart phones and tablets which they used in the personal lives, but at work they were reliant on legacy radio systems, and not only had to manually  enter the same data into up to ten different systems.

Clearly there isn't going to be a simple solution to complex problem such as the Met's IT infrastructure, when much of the IT budget is spent on maintaining existing systems, reducing the amount available for investment in new infrastructure. However, as the report highlights, it's not hard to imagine how police officers would benefit from using secure mobile devices which would enable them to enter details of their investigations in real-time into handheld devices, providing them with immediate access to police resources and data, and reducing the amount of paper work and data re-entry.

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Software Growing into a Driving Force for Network Transformation...And More Award Kudos for Wind River

By Jessica Schieve

If you haven’t yet noticed, a network transformation is underway and moving at record pace.  Over the past 18 months, the industry has pushed the concepts of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization to the forefront of our consciousness. These ideas represent new approaches to architecting and designing the networks of the future. Behind both initiatives are many discussions about how software can better be used to do more with the existing infrastructure and network elements.   

So, it’s no surprise that one of this year’s Leading Lights finalists in the Best New Product for Telecom category is Wind River’s very own Open Virtualization Profile. Open Virtualization Profile is a high performance real-time virtualization software solution using open source kernel virtualization technology.  Specifically designed for the telecom industry, Open Virtualization Profile is the first open solution that delivers the low latency and high throughput functionality needed to virtualize network functions to meet the demanding needs of the industry. Equipment providers no longer need to try to fit a square peg in a round hole or make performance tradeoffs….with real-time high performance, Open Virtualization Profile can deliver extremely low latency measuring as low as under 3 microseconds. You can learn more about Wind River Open Virtualization Profile here. 

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Challenges Ahead for In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems (Infographic)

By Franz Walkembach

A revolution is taking place behind the scenes of car manufacturers’ closed doors. Software is taking center stage in the creation of a differentiated driving experience. It is a sea change from this traditionally hardware dominant world. According to a recent report from ABI Research, it’s expected that shipments of connected automotive infotainment systems will grow from 9 million in 2013 to more than 62 million in 2018 with connected navigation, multimedia streaming, social media, and in-car Wi-Fi hotspots becoming key features.

With greater connectivity and adoption of consumer electronic technologies in the car, automobiles are increasingly become more complex embedded systems. It will be important for car companies to find experts, like Wind River, to fill in their knowledge gaps when designing future generations of IVI systems. 

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The Future of the RTOS is Driving the Internet of Things

By Bill Graham

Real-time operating systems (RTOS) are having to become increasingly sophisticated – they must satisfy performance demands, offer hard real-time response and handle memory constraints, but increasingly they also need to deliver capabilities demanded by the new, highly connected, security conscious, remotely managed world of machine to machine (M2M) networks and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Intelligent devices and systems make up IoT, and the majority of the billions of these “things” that make up the connected world are embedded systems, many of which are running an RTOS. It is critical that these embedded systems are connected, scalable, secure, safe and reliable.

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What is Needed for a Modern User Interface?

By Stephen Olson

I am astounded at the transformation of the user interface in recent history.  The latest trends including facial recognition for authentication, gester technology both visually and with accelerometers in the device to describe a symbol to the device for authentication.  But each time these innovations come about, we should ask the question:  Is it all really necessary?

As we look into the history of user interfaces on embedded devices, there were some clear cause and effect situations.  Take for example the IMSAI personal computer that predates the Apple and IBM PC.

 

While this was the “cool” factor of its day, each switch and LED had dedicated meaning.   And the physical switches meant you knew what state the switch was in before one toggled in an instruction.  Intuitive, no.  Informative, yes, if you know how to use it.  And once you knew how to use it, it was a very effective way of programming the computer directly with machine code.  But the days of the physical toggle switches and Red LEDs is long since past and user interfaces have evolved.

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UEFI on Simics

By Jakob Engblom

This week, at the Intel Development Forum in San Francisco, we are announcing the upcoming availability of UEFI support in the Simics source code debugger. It is thus a good time to talk a bit more about UEFI and UEFI debug.

UEFI is the modern BIOS standard that is finally starting to replace classic BIOS in PCs and related machines. It provides for much more powerful and modular BIOSes, as well as secure booting and other important modern firmware features. For quite a few years now, Intel reference BIOSes for new platforms (like Crystal Forest, Tunnel Creek, and Haswell) have been built using UEFI, and the Simics models for these platforms have been tested using these reference BIOSes.

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