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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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Last week, I read a BBC News story (Met Police technology 'ineffective and outdated') about how the Metropolitan Police force in London, UK was being hampered in its fight against crime by out of date technologies.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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Wind River Expertise Recognized with GENIVI Award

By Franz Walkembach

The Automotive group at Wind River is quite an impressive team…Consider this: hundreds of engineers and decades of successfully completed projects have helped Wind River carefully foster the development in this industry. We not only created trusted connections with customers and partners, but we’ve also stayed ahead of key trends, riding a wave of open source innovation right as it started to build momentum. Fast forward to today…our ongoing efforts to advance the automotive industry has reached another great achievement – Wind River has received the Most Valuable Contributor Award from the GENIVI Alliance.

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The Yocto Project...Striking the balance of speed and stability

By Davide Ricci

On my flight back to the Bay Area, I was reflecting on my memories of Barcelona at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012. I’m recalling my time on stage, during the opening panel of the Yocto Project Dev Day, with my friends and colleagues from Texas Instruments, Intel, Jupiter, and ... Mentor. Surprised at the mix of panelists? Well, consider this - the power of the Yocto Project comes from the fact that companies across the entire ecosystem are all sitting together at the same table with one common agenda, one common goal in mind.

This year’s LinuxCon Europe seemed to burst with attendees! Many developers who flew in from all over Europe, North America, and Asia also attended Dev Day (held the day right after LinuxCon). Attendance has grown from previous Dev Days and the sea of excited developers nodding their heads in agreement and solidarity at our Dev Day sessions added to the momentum behind the Yocto Project and its goal to drive real change. 

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Poll Results are in...Network Intelligence Heading to Edge and Core

By Steve Konish

If you’re an information junkie like I am, informative charts and polls always catch the eye. Polls are great for capturing an instant snapshot of public opinion on a specific topic. By no means are they scientific. However, they do give us some useful data to gauge whether or not other people share the same opinions we do.

We decided to conduct our own poll related to network intelligence. During a recent Wind River webinar, titled Triple Crown of Network Goes to Software, we took a poll of 200 attendees. If you missed the webinar, not to worry, you can view the archived version. The poll asked the audience where they think network intelligence is initially most needed. The respondents, mostly network equipment providers, gave us these results:

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Just minutes to a faster, smarter and more secure network

By Stephen Konish

A few minutes…and you’re on the fast path to building the next generation of faster, smarter and more secure network applications. Three minutes – that’s all it typically takes to install key components of the new Wind River Intelligent Network Platform. 

So, let’s take the next few minutes to look at  an evolution taking place for our networking and communications customers and Wind River’s software solutions for this market.  Tens of billions of connected devices continue to generate massive amounts of traffic and security threats are on the rise. In order to better manage the flood of traffic and handle these threats, greater network intelligence and security (without sacrificing high performance) is needed. On top of that, network products need to be scalable to handle future growth. Wind River is rising to meet these challenges and this evolution starts with the newly launched Wind River Intelligent Network Platform.  It is an integrated and optimized embedded software platform consisting of the critical runtime components needed to build high-performance intelligent network products.  So, what does that mean for the customer?

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Wind River Linux and the Yocto Project…Sowing the seeds of change

By Davide Ricci

The year was 1998, I was walking through the aisles of a book store on campus at the Politecnico of Milano and a box of software caught my eye. It looked unconventional, sort of "homemade" and on its cover was an image of a man with a red hat.

It was Red Hat 5.2, and the box was big, much bigger than the bunch of DVDs inside would have justified. And heavy. Once I cracked it open, I figured out why – it included a thick manual that contained seemingly endless pages of instructions and mysterious lists of software packages.

It was 1998, and open source was starting to make its first serious steps into a world which, only a handful of years later would change dramatically. A revolution was about to begin.

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The Yocto Project: What It Is and What It Isn't

By Davide Ricci

As I work heavily with embedded Linux on a daily basis, I’m often asked about the Yocto Project.  While the Yocto Project is gaining traction and folks in the industry are generally aware of it, there still exists a bit of unfamiliarity of the details. What exactly is the Yocto Project? Is it a Linux distribution?  How would I use it in my embedded Linux projects? 

Let’s dig in. The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides sorely needed standardized, high-quality infrastructure, tools and methodologies to help decrease the complexity and increase the portability of embedded Linux implementations. It is not a Linux distribution similar to what Wind River and other Linux distributors provide.  

A lot of vendors across the hardware and software ecosystem participate in the Yocto Project, and together this community is helping embedded Linux developers realize greater cross-platform compatibility and component interoperability.   How the heck does the Yocto Project accomplish that?

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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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Linux Foundation’s License Compliance Standard, SPDX, Offers Real Value

By Mark Gisi

There is only one criterion that determines whether a piece of software is open source software (OSS) - the license from which you receive the software under. If you are granted rights under an open source license such as the BSD, Apache or GPL, it is open source software.

Although the open source movement has other core pillars, which include the power of the community development model, peer recognition, and community review (the many eyeballs affect), there is no movement without the license.

Open source developers do not ask for much for the use of their software. What little they do request is described by a few conditional obligations listed in the license. In exchange for satisfying those obligations, the user is granted certain rights with respect to copying, modifying and/or redistributing the developer’s creation. Obligations may include a requirement to pass along the source code, provide certain notifications (e.g., modification notices) or just simply provide attribution. The task of satisfying the respective license obligations is often referred to as license compliance.

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Wind River and Android – 5 great years, with many more to come

By Dan Noal

It was 5 years ago this week that I got an email from our CEO who had just met with Andy Rubin and Rich Miner at the Googleplex. Google had invited us to talk privately and confidentially about what would become Android.  Other companies were already on board, and they asked us to join the small group of companies collaborating with them as part of the nascent Open Handset Alliance. They talked big about disrupting the entire mobile phone ecosystem and solving the fragmentation problem with so many competing Linux based phone stacks emerging at that time. They painted a vision where open source Android would dominate the mobile phone space and migrate to adjacent markets.  We knew that they had credibility from Danger, we knew that Google had tremendous momentum and power they could leverage.  We discussed it internally, and without much debate we replied “where do we sign?” and started to roll up our sleeves. 

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Wind River Linux: The Thrills Just Keep Coming

By Paul Anderson

When I joined Wind River over ten years ago, there were many in the company and in the embedded industry that saw open source software with extreme skepticism: too big, too slow, too risky, too expensive to maintain, and so forth. Over the years, the industry at large has figured out that open source software, particularly Linux, has an essential role in the embedded ecosystem, just as real time operating systems, software development tools, test frameworks, and many other things play a critical role in developing and deploying embedded device. But, the role of Linux embedded development represents something else, a fundamental change in the way people think and act as it relates to how software is developed, deployed and maintained in the embedded space. Linux is different.

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Secure Mobility Message Resonates at MILCOM 2011

By Chip Downing

MILCOM 2011 last week in Baltimore, MD was not only educational, but it was a watershed event.   Last year, it was a “coming out” party for custom Android devices; this year however, was the year where many companies are now using COTS hardware and software to their fullest extent, along the entire supply chain, from core to edge and user devices.   I believe this COTS adoption is driven by two powerful forces – the exploding capabilities of commercial tablet devices, and global military budget pressures.

The vastly increasing power and capability of commercially available mobile communications devices is simply amazing. Just a few years ago, almost everything in this military communications space was purpose built, and most commercial products were simply inadequate to address the rugged and complex system demands of military communications systems.   As seen at MILCOM 2011, this has officially changed -- COTS end-to-end communications domains rule.

So if all of these MILCOM vendors are not making customized hardware and software, what are they doing?   Wind River had over 500 people visit its booth at MILCOM this year, and most of the discussions I had with both suppliers and end users at the show were about increasing device security and leveraging high volume COTS components in demanding deployment scenarios.

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Cloud to Service Endpoints – The Missing Link

By Paul Anderson

I remember as a kid I was fascinated with phones. The idea that you could pick up the phone, dial it, and talk to someone on the other end was pretty neat. And… at the time, a phone was an elegantly designed electro-mechanical work of art, and it was fun to take them apart to try and figure out how they worked. I could understand how the phone itself worked, but as a kid, what happened after those two wires headed off to the pole was somewhat of a mystery to me. Eventually I came to understand the massive infrastructure that allowed reliable telephone service into the home to be possible. Hats off to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

When you think of a basic phone, it seems like such a simple thing. It can receive, it can transmit, and it can provide bidirectional signaling. Receiving and transmitting is obviously important, and it took a while for folks to figure out how to do both simultaneously without a bunch of extra wires and things. Signaling is equally important. The user of the device needs to know when someone is trying to contact them, and to be able to establish contact with someone else out on the network. A phone is actually a very clever thing, particularly when one thinks of what people did with what they had at the time, particularly in a world before the transistor.

But, what is a phone really? It is a service gateway. In its most simple form, it provides telephone service. That service then allows connectivity to other services, like the ability to call the plumber when your sink gets clogged, or order a pizza. Quite amazing! 

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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. 

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Fish Finders, Embedded Linux and Graphics

By Paul Anderson 

Here I am up at rustic cabin in Northern Wisconsin enjoying some time off the grid. I feel like Ralph Waldo Emerson getting in touch with nature, and exploring Transcendentalism, except for one minor detail: I have a wireless connection. Emerson was quoted as saying “Nature hates calculators,” and I’m not sure what he would think about the billions of connected devices scattered across the landscape. Not to worry, I’ll be back unplugged soon enough and enjoying some quality time in the “digital free zone.”

I tried my hand at some fishing this week on the little lake we are on. Even though I’m a gadget person in general, I am a very low tech fisherman. With the help of my brother in law, my kids and I just fished the old fashioned way, with a pole, hook, bobber, and worm. It didn’t take long to find the fish, or for the fish to find us. However, there are plenty of high tech anglers out there that use everything from advanced weather forecast maps, fish finders, and even underwater cameras. I find all that technology interferes with the peace of mind that I am looking for when doing things like fishing, but perhaps that is because I am fully immersed in technology as a career.

Modern high end fish finders, GPS units, and other electronics equipment used in the outdoors have become much more sophisticated. The users of deeply embedded devices have come to expect a graphical user interface, low power consumption, and reliability. A similar trend can be found across a spectrum of deeply embedded devices, including industrial control panels, medical equipment, military applications, and of course, consumer equipment.

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Android software quality: it's all in a single number

By Chris Buerger

Picture this: you are responsible for ensuring that the quality of the Android device you are about to ship will hold up in front of your customers. You are responsible that it will meet the often elusive 'commercial quality' goal. And it doesn't matter whether the Android software is being released as an initial software load on a new class of device or as a maintenance release for a device that is already in market. Also, ignore for a moment whether you sourced the Android software from your hardware Original Device Manufacturer (ODM) as part of a package deal or whether it represents significant investment into internal engineering budget.

The basic question to answer is simply: 'Is this software ready to be released?'. Or casting the net wider, will the software be good enough to stay below the return targets for the device? Will it be so good to act as a differentiator vs. your competitors and therefore help to meet your customer acquisition goals? And, if the software goes out to devices already in market, will it keep its users as engaged and satisfied with your brand as the prior device?

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Google I/O and MeeGo Developer Conference – A Tale of Two Events

By Chris Buerger

First off, let me say that it is not fair to directly compare the two conferences to draw a conclusion about the comparative future of Android and MeeGo. Both software stacks are at a different place in their respective life cycles, and important maturity indicators such as overall ecosystem support (silicon providers, device manufacturers, application developer community etc…) as well as software quality/complexity are simply at a different stage for each technology.

However, who is interested in fairness? There is a perception in the marketplace that Android and MeeGo are competitive technologies in a proliferation war that includes other heavyweights such as Apple, Microsoft, Samsung and HP. If industry analysts put all of these software stacks on a single Mobile OS market share chart, they’ve got to be competitive, right?

Not quite. One important reason Android got to where it is today is that its first mass-market device, the HTC G1, sold millions of units across the globe, thus delivering a very tangible proof point to rally a worldwide ecosystem to participate in the development of Android. MeeGo’s proliferation, partly because of the rather wide device scope the software stack is attempting to cover, is following a different path.

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IDEF 2011

By Paul Parkinson

Recently, I attended the IDEF 2011 defence trade show in Instanbul as part of the Wind River team exhibiting on the Tektronik (Turkish distributor) stand.

Our partner, Curtiss-Wright, who were also exhibiting at the event, had kindly lent me a VPX chassis and VPX6-185 board, which I used to demonstrate a Cross-Domain Solution (CDS) demo running on VxWorks MILS. The demo filters packets of data between black and red networks based on the security classification of the data, and uses multiple partitions to implement sender and receiver on different interfaces.

The demo currently uses a simple encryption algorithm for data passed over the black network (which wouldn't present much of a challenge to GCHQ/CESG or NSA),  so I decided to replace it with a stronger encryption algorithm which is more appropriate for real world systems. I initially considered using an open source implementation of AES-256, but then I remembered the export controls on 256-bit AES, so I decided to use a public domain implementation of the Russian GOST 28147-89 (which also uses a 256-bit keys).

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Embedded is cool (and getting even cooler)

By Paul Anderson

When people ask me what I do, I never know how to answer the question. Most people state their occupation. But, does that define what we do? I usually respond with something cheeky like “metabolize,” or “provide for those around me” or “go running or fly airplanes any chance I get.” But, usually people want to know what you do for a living. I usually get stumped when they ask that particular question.

I asked my youngest child what he thought I did for a living. He said “play with computers all day,” which is not entirely inaccurate. I asked my oldest, and he said “fly airplanes” (again, I do fly a lot of airplanes, but unfortunately I spend most of my time as a passenger rather than a pilot). My pets would say my entire existence is dedicated to providing them food and entertainment (obviously they have figured something out). My wife would say that I type on the computer, talk on the phone, go to meetings, and spend way too much time in airplanes and at hotels. Although accurate, it doesn’t get at the core of what I do.

When I try to explain to people what I do in any detail, after a minute or so I see their eyes glaze over. I have taken to just saying “I’m in the software business.” I can usually get away with that, but sometime people actually want to know more.

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Getting Started with OpenSAF

By Glenn Seiler

Usage of OpenSAF is growing exponentially. The number of companies I hear from that are evaluating or considering using OpenSAF grows every month. A common trend that I see more and more often is that someone in an R&D capacity or someone charged with creating a prototype downloads OpenSAF from opensaf.org and begins working with it, to acquaint them with the technology.  For example, if you are a Wind River Linux user, you can download a pristine version of OpenSAF software directly from the Wind River Developers Network that has been pre-validated and packaged to build with Wind River’s Linux Distribution Assembly Tool (LDAT).  The version of OpenSAF you can download from Wind River Developer Network is exactly the same as the current version of OpenSAF at devel.opensaf.org, except it has been put into a ‘layer’ that is recognized and used by Wind River’s build environment. This can save significant time and effort for companies that want to do a quick analysis or build of OpenSAF.

The most common method for getting support or help for OpenSAF projects is by utilizing “community support.” The Wind River Developer Network is a great place to look for answers or to post a question. This is where members of Wind River’s OpenSAF and Linux engineering community can help. In addition, the OpenSAF project has many helpful documents and mailing lists that can provide help.  There are many mailing lists that you should consider subscribing to, including a developers mailing list that is used by many of the actual developers contributing code to the OpenSAF project.

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Is Linux Secure?

By Paul Anderson

It’s the wrong question, really. Are my financial and medical records secure? What about all that information stored in the cloud? What about my desktop computer or cell phone? What about the power grid and other infrastructure? Should I be worried?

The answer to all those questions is “It depends on what you mean by ‘secure.’” One may need to consider: What is the definition security? Or what is an acceptable level of risk at that level of security?

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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. 

 

Will embedded Linux development ever defragment?

By Paul Anderson

We have seen the power of open source and open standards transform much of the enterprise space, particularly in the server market. Before the success of open source in server space, there were really only two choices: Run an operating system and applications developed and maintained by a hardware manufacturer, or choose one of only a few commercial operating systems and applications that spanned different manufacturers.  Hardware manufacturers optimized each operating system to best suit the hardware they sold, creating a lack of compatibility between hardware manufacturers. Alternatively, commercial enterprise operating systems typically were not optimized for each hardware platform, and as a result, did not perform well. Given these scenarios, a system architect, integrator, or developer, often had to make hard choices and compromises.

With the advent of open source operating systems and applications, the software landscape changed dramatically. After a slow start, there was a bloom of available operating systems and applications available. There was little standardization or compatibility between the different operating system, distribution, and application variants. It was nice to have a choice, but all of these options also created fragmentation. With time, open standards within the enterprise space developed, from carrier grade standards (CGL), to application environment standards (LSB), to standardized application stacks (LAMP). For a variety of reasons, there has not been a single distribution or package standard, but things are now similar enough that system architects, integrators, and developers have a fairly standardized environment and a rich ecosystem of hardware and software from which to choose.

Now consider the embedded community – the world of deeply embedded development has evolved in a much different manner.

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Military Aerospace & Electronics Show UK

 By Paul Parkinson

I am looking forward to attending the UK's Military, Aerospace & Electronics Show, which will take place on 30th November.

This year's conference programme has a strong emphasis on open systems architectures, but there is also an increasing focus on Information Security. To complement these themes, there will be a live demonstration of the VxWorks MILS separation kernel on the Wind River exhibition stand, so if you are planning to attend the event, please drop by.

During the afternoon session, my colleague Stuart Gray & I will be running a workshop 'A Practical Foundation for Safety Innovation'.  As an introduction, I will be giving a brief overview on the capabilities of the VxWorks 6 Cert Platform and explaining how it can be used to develop mission-critical and safety-critical systems requiring certification up to DO-178B Level A, but most of the session will be spent providing delegates with hands-on access to the VxWorks 6 Cert Platform. We recommend that you sign up in advance to avoid disappointment as workshop places are limited.

Cambridge, Cows and CELF

By Paul Anderson

I'm currently in Cambridge, UK and having a great time at the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) Embedded Linux Conference. I enjoyed a great ride on the London Underground and then the train to Cambridge. It's always fun to watch the folks come and go at the various stops and countryside scroll by. It's fun to observe what happens on a typical day. In spite of a bit of rain, Cambridge is a vibrant town - many students, folks on bikes, nice places to eat, and interesting architecture and history. Thanks to some disciplined co-workers, I've gotten up each day at 6AM for a morning run along the River Cam. While running through the dark along the river, we suddenly encountered some large black and white lumps that we soon realized were cows resting in a pasture. They looked on with mild amusement as we ran through the pasture, wondering what might be chasing us. It's always fun to be in the city one minute, and in the country the next!

The CELF Embedded Linux Conference events were fantastic. It was a small conference of 260 attendees, but those who attended are among the best and brightest open source developers and leaders focused on embedded applications.

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Groundhog Day

By Paul Anderson

You know the movie…Bill Murray plays a weatherman covering Groundhog Day, and finds himself stuck in a time loop. He is forced to relive the same day over and over until he eventually finds redemption and is able to move on with his life. I sometimes find that many in the embedded open source software world are also stuck in a time loop. Back in 1983, I was a young open source developer working on the Berkeley Software Distribution. My task at the time was to make it run on a Digital Corporation PDP-11/84. I remember spending day after day hand assembling boot code and toggling it into the machine so I could load data from a tape drive. This task didn’t take merely days; it amounted to weeks of work. I eventually was able to get the system to boot in a basic mode, and spent the rest of my summer writing drivers and making the machine usable. Fast forward to 1993, and I was an embedded medical device developer doing the same basic work, but this time on a Motorola 68000 series processor. I spent months getting an operating system up to the point where I could begin my application development. About a decade later, I was directing a team of engineers to get open source software up and running on a variety of different embedded processors.

Back in the "old days," just getting to a boot prompt on a new piece of hardware was a difficult and a necessary step in developing an embedded device. Now, thanks to the advent of Linux, many reference boards come with some sort of basic functioning operating system. However, the work is hardly done for those who are trying to develop and deploy an embedded device.

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Interview with Girish Venkatasubramanian

By Jakob Engblom

After my blog post on Academic Simics earlier this Summer, I got a very nice reply from Girish Venkatasubramanian of UFL. Turned out that he and his group was doing some really interesting and exciting stuff with Simics, researching into Hypervisor architectures and hardware support. Having been a PhD student myself, I can certainly appreciate the excitement and fun of working in that field. We ended up doing a virtual interview, which I am happy to present here.

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Coming Next Week: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

We have been busy creating a new resource for our Linux users to connect with others! One of the most high profile and exciting initiatives that I've been tasked with, is to partner with other Wind River staff, and create a place for Linux users of all kinds to come together. We've heard what our customers have been asking for and they were the key drivers behind this project:

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The ‘Big Reveal’ Release Approach in Mobile Linux – How Android and MeeGo Differ

By Chris Buerger

A couple of weeks ago, I read through a somewhat heated email thread about the ‘Big Reveal’ mentality that Intel and Nokia were claimed to apply to the pending MeeGo 1.0 release. By coincidence, the timing overlapped with the excitement Google was stirring up for its 2.2 (Froyo) release of Android. Both events made me wonder about the value of a ‘big reveal’ approach in mobile open source stacks, and whether there might not be developments that occur within rapidly maturing software stacks that are native and systemic to the open source model, and that at the same time change the potential impact of ‘Big Reveal’ releases of either Android or MeeGo.

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