Wind River Blog Network

Are Penguins Ready to Fly?

By Nithya Ruff

This year, Vancouver, British Columbia was the site for LinuxCon North America 2011, where Linux celebrated its 20^th anniversary.  Vancouver is normally known for its rainy and gray weather, but the Linux gods must have been shining on the Linux celebrations because the weather was spectacular!  In the same year that Wind River celebrates its 30 anniversary, it got me thinking about if this was a forecast of things to come.  

Turning 20 is a coming of age milestone and that can truly be said of Linux.   I see a well-established ecosystem of upstream open source projects, successful commercial companies based on open source and an increasing number of industries that are adopting Linux.   Business models are maturing and there is a good understanding of the value that commercial vendors bring to creating adoption and making it safe to use Linux.  There seems to increasingly be a process for working across and within groups.  Look at what the Linux Foundation does. It provides an umbrella organization for collaboration projects like the kernel, Meego and Yocto to organize and move things forward and advocate for the Linux community very effectively.  It also provides a physical venue for people to gather and meet face to face and create vision and directions. 

Continue reading >>

It Was Like Sending My Son Off to College…

By De Anna Mekwunye

1992 was an eventful year for me and for Wind River.  I started with the company on June 1st and within several months I learned that the small private company that I started with was now planning an IPO.  Once we announced that we would be going public, many of our lives changed.  A group of us from the executive offices, marketing and finance almost lived at 1010 Atlantic (the old address prior to our campus today) day and night to get our CEO Jerry Fiddler ready for an IPO roadshow.  There was so much to do.  We had to craft a presentation that could sell our story to Wall Street.  This wasn’t going to be an easy task – how do you explain what a real-time operating system is?  The world-wide-web wasn’t readily available then. Wind River didn’t have a website at the time.  It wasn’t like people could go to Google and look up terms like RTOS, ANSI, embedded systems or ubiquitous technology. We were using Mac desktop computers and fax machines.  Instead of cell phones, we had beepers.  Email simply wasn’t the main mode of communication at the time.  Nevertheless, we all worked tirelessly to develop a mature, professional looking presentation that would convey who were, what our value proposition was, and how our products were superior to the market. Our presentation wasn’t to be presented on a laptop using PowerPoint either...we used a slide projector!  Once we were all happy with the presentation, I took the files to a vendor in Berkeley who made actual slides to be used with a slide projector. 

Just to be safe, we had two sets of slides created for our upcoming IPO roadshow.  After months of hard work, we were now getting ready for the roadshow and IPO in April 1993. Everything seemed to be coming together well, but timing was a bit of concern.  At the time, Jerry’s wife Missy was expecting their third child any day. We also had to make sure that Jerry looked professional and presentable. He definitely needed to get a haircut and his beard trimmed—this was not an easy task and one that nobody wanted to voluntarily undertake.  We also had to make sure that he had a proper business suit- no Hawaiian shirts, shorts or flip-flops.  These were actual topics of concern at many of our pre-roadshow meetings just to make sure that everything came off without a hitch.  Four days before the IPO, Missy goes into labor and Jerry delivers their daughter Zoe at home.  After the arrival of the baby, Jerry and Missy even entertained a small group of friends – that same night!  Amazing!

When the day finally comes to send Jerry, David Wilner and Dale Wilde off to do the roadshow, the limousine I had previously reserved is ready and waiting outside of our offices.  As we did one last mad run around the offices to make sure that everything was packed, a small group of us gathered in the lobby to see them off.  We were all beaming with pride with great big smiles, wishing them well.  I felt like we as a company were growing up!  It felt as if I was sending my son off to college.  1992-1993 was truly an exciting time at Wind River.

 Happy anniversary Wind River!

The Best Software On Any Planet

By Mike Deliman

In 1995, after finishing up on a particularly challenging project, my boss came to me with a new project.  He asked, “Have you ever heard of Jet Propulsion Laboratory?   Would you like to work with them?”  Without hesitation, I jumped at the offer to sign on.

 I grew up not too far from JPL, and as a child I was a big fan of the space industry, as well as the TV show Star Trek.  I not only knew that JPL was part of NASA, but also that JPL made space probes. 

This was my first real space project.  At the time, I was the most junior member of the team.  Our team was comprised of several engineers at JPL, several at Loral Federal Space Systems, and a handful of folks at Wind River.  The mission was Mars Pathfinder, the first attempt from NASA to use commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software and a COTS computer to put a robot on another planet.  I was honored to join the team.

The plan was to build a robot that would land on the surface of Mars, and perform some science experiments.  A remote-control rover was added to the payload.  The robot was to land on Mars and operate in-situ for a month.   Our task was to port the VxWorks operating system to this processor, new to us, for the first time.  The processor was based on the IBM RS6000.

This task was a top-to-bottom port of the operating system to the CPU.  This required an in-depth understanding of how the CPU operated on all levels, and an understanding of the division between the CPU, Board Support, and the OS itself.  It even required understanding how various compiler tools handled the ABI, and later the EABI, for the architecture.  I had never worked on a complete architecture port before this.

This was – to that point in time – the most demanding job I had ever done.  And it was the most fun, as well as the most cooperative team I’d worked with.  I learned an incredible amount, enough to tie-together everything I’d learned about computing in university, and more.

We worked some incredibly long hours, and made our milestones and deliveries.  In December of 1996, we were invited to the product launch proceedings at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  As special guests, we had passes to park near the launch area and sit in grandstands just 5 miles away from the pad. It was an awe-inspiring sight. I felt like a real VIP.

In July 1997, I attended the landing ceremonies for family and friends of Pathfinder at JPL in Pasadena.  When the first image came back from Mars, the entire assembly erupted in fantastic celebration – we had landed on Mars!

Happy anniversary Wind River!

Wind River Turns 30: Looking Back and Moving Forward

By Tomas Evensen 

2011 marks Wind River’s 30th anniversary. The big 3-0…it’s a major landmark moment in anyone’s book. This year, we’ll be taking time to honor this milestone with a retrospective of Wind River’s history and also a series of employee stories.  In my many years with the company, Wind River always impressed on me the concept of  being bigger than just a single product or technology. There is an underlying spirit within our teams that constantly reaches for more, for some greater innovation. While many customers know Wind River for the VxWorks real-time operating system, it was always part of the vision to provide more value. In the early days, this entailed providing a TCP/IP stack and GDB for debugging. Later, additional value came from strong IDE support through Tornado and Workbench. Lately, it has been by providing a choice of operating systems, real-time or open source/Linux. 

A standout example that exemplified the vision of providing a more complete solution was when we embarked on creating a truly embedded hypervisor. In 2004, it had already become clear to us that virtualization would play an important role in embedded designs at some point in the future. In early 2005, Paul Borman who worked for me in the CTO Office created a very impressive prototype, called eCPU, that ran VxWorks and Linux on a single CPU and we learned a lot from that effort. When Johan Fornaeus came on board in 2006 through an acquisition (he was co-founder of Interpeak and before that, one of the co-designers of the Enea/OSE operating system), I had him leading a small nimble task force team to develop a hypervisor really suited for the embedded space. I felt we made a real breakthrough. This was not a repackaged operating system pretending to be something it was not designed for, but instead a truly unique approach to virtualization and separation. Over the next couple years, this small team created a scalable product with an extremely tight footprint, incredible performance, while at the same time being full featured for the common architectures such as Intel, Power, ARM and MIPS.

Back in those days, it was not clear to us when and how important multi-OS systems would be in the future, but today it is hard to imagine how to deal with these new complex systems without a hypervisor for embedded virtualization. Looking at my team’s achievement now, I still marvel at how the Wind River Hypervisor brings together multi-core and our various operating systems. Why choose between operating systems with different characteristics when you can mix them in one system? Throw in a networking stack optimized for multi-core and tools that can debug and find performance bottlenecks and you get a very capable foundation on which our customers can innovate.

By constantly looking to the future, Wind River continues to evolve and further build on its expertise. The ongoing push to innovate may have created interesting and complex challenges along the way. However, it has also resulted in celebrations and breakthroughs, and it’s undoubtedly a big reason why so many of us continue to stay on the ride.