Wind River Blog Network

BMW wants to go open

By Doug Schaefer

Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.

The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.

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Open Source Handhelds

By Doug Schaefer

Quite a while ago now I posted about the open source gaming device from Korea know as the GP2X. At the end of the day, it ended up with a storied history and while I love the concept of a handheld mobile device for which you can write your own applications, their execution as a company out side of Korea wasn't that great and only a distributor in the UK was able to make any kind of splash with it.

At any rate, I found on Slashdot that they have announced a new generation of the product called the Wiz. The links lead you to the UK site and a big JPEG of the brochure in English. The specs look pretty good, ARM9 processor at 533MHz, 3D accelerated graphics, Linux of course, and support for audio and video making it a pretty cool multimedia gaming machine, for which you can write your own applications. And hopefully they'll be a bit more successful at delivering it than the last one.

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nEUROn UCAV programme

By Paul Parkinson

In case you missed the news, the article 'COTS for unmanned flights' (Electronic Product Design, 22nd April 2008) describes how the nEUROn UCAV programme (Airforce Technology) has standardized on the VxWorks 653 RTOS.

nEUROn is a technology demonstrator programme involving five European companies, which in itself is not unusual, but it does have a significant objective - to demonstrate the maturity of technologies by producing modular safety-critical avionics systems running on COTS-based on-board computers. The development of avionics systems for a UCAV are in some ways even more challenging than for a military fast jet, given that it will provide a similar level of capability, but yet has less Space, Weight and Power (SWaP) available. This is one of the driving factors behind the ARINC 653 software architecture, enabling multiple applications to be hosted on a common computing platform (see 'ARINC 653 software weighs less' for background).

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Software wants to be free…

By Doug Gaff

…to run on the hardware of your choice. Or so Psystar wants you to believe about the Leopard OS. In case you haven't been following this story, Psystar has created a Mac computer clone and is selling them pre-installed with Leopard (or Ubuntu, XP, Vista, or nothing). It's called an Open Computer. According to Apple, this is a violation of Leopard's EULA. I don't use a Mac, and while I am occasionally wowed by these bright and shiny objects, I prefer to be voluntarily water-boarded by Vista. So this particular offer doesn't appeal to me.

However, I do find it both comical and a little scary. In the Operating System space, be it host OS's or real-time OS's, the name of the game is running on as many platforms as your customers can dream up. Wind River's operating systems have been doing this from the beginning. Like many others, we affectionately call this our "Matrix of Pain". PC vendors are no exception, of course. In fact, many of the critical problems people run into with Vista and Linux have to do with hardware driver problems (or non-existence) and not the OS's themselves. Apple is certainly lucky to have such a small set of platforms to support.

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We don't need another Java dialect. What we need is expertise.

By Franco Gasperoni, AdaCore

A group of experts is investigating the creation of a Java variant for safety-critical systems that can undergo DO-178B certification. This ongoing effort finds its roots in the work on the real-time specification for Java that started in December 1998.

The question is: What problem does this effort try to solve?

The answer is not technology. There are many technical challenges to create a Java derivative suitable for the development of safety-critical software. These challenges make this task interesting for a group of experts. Yet, there is no technical need for another programming language in the safety-critical domain. Indeed today there are plenty of safety-critical systems developed using a plethora of technologies and successfully programmed in Ada 83/Ada 95 and C/C++.

Managing Software Obsolescence

By Paul Parkinson

Yesterday, I attended the Component Obsolescence Group (COG) quarterly meeting, which was held at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford.  I was standing in for my colleague Alex Wilson, who wasn't able to attend, and I gave his presentation 'Managing Software Obsolescence through Standards.'

The presentation was about how open standards and software abstraction can provide isolation from underlying hardware architectures, and can assist processor architecture migration as part of a technology refresh cycle. This is important in many A&D programmes, given in the increasing in-service lifetimes of some systems, but the principle also applies to other vertical markets too. The presentation also highlighted how the RTCA/DO-297 standard provides guidance on the development of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) platforms to enable modular and incremental certification of safety-critical systems, but this actually provides a side-benefit which can help address obsolescence. This is because it advocates a role-based approach, and advocates separation of the configuration data based on role and activities.

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Drive by Ethernet?

By Paul Parkinson

I read last week that BMW has been researching the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) over standard Ethernet (Cisco) to network automotive controllers ('BMW brings Internet protocol under the hood', EETimes).

The motivation for the research is that at present, a number of different networking technologies (including CAN, LIN, MOST and FlexRay) are used in automotive applications, and these are optimized for different types of application, but the lack of standardization results in complexity and cost.

So, I was expecting the article to say that BMW had found Ethernet to be suitable for non-critical applications, but not well-suited to critical systems.

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The Check is in the Mail, Do No Evil and Other Matters of Trust

By Jason Whitmire

All will agree that mobile Linux suffers from fragmentation today, and that fragmentation
•    creates significant challenges to Linux adoption in mobile phones (lack of interoperability et. al.) 
•    presents barriers to innovation
•    increases the carrier cost to Linux terminal deployment.

For Linux to succeed in the mobile market, we need to minimize fragmentation and its resulting incompatibility.  In the early days of the PC revolution, this type of incompatibility was similarly rampant, and the Wintel monopoly provided the standard.  More importantly, the Wintel monopoly created the incentive to rally around the standard. 

But suggesting that the industry set up Google as the mobile Linux gatekeeper, including issuing all the keys to the various feature phone middleware/applications framework kingdoms (which account for about 90% of all phones deployed today), to take on the monumental role of software guardian for mobile Linux, is possibly antithetical to the open source movement, regardless of Google’s motto.  And perhaps this is not the role that Google ultimately seeks in the mobile market.  Indeed, there are multiple thrusts to Google’s mobile terminal strategy, all of which are underpinned by the principle of radically improving the efficiency and experience of the end-user’s mobile internet time.

Open Interfaces Needed

By Doug Gaff

Customers demand choice, choice drives competition, and competition drives innovation and lowered cost.   That's a Free Market Economy, right?

Well, no economic or political system is completely pure. Take my iPod for example. iPod's are small, pretty, and surprisingly reliable from a software perspective. But once you buy one, you're locked into "accessory monopoly." Not an Apple accessory monopoly exactly, but a monopoly on the iPod hardware interface itself. I have an Alpine iPod deck with a digital interface in my car, an Onkyo iPod dock on my home stereo, and a couple of iPod chargers. All of these plug into the digital interface on the bottom of the iPod. The interface is nice. It provides digital extraction of MP3 files so that decoding can be done by external A/V equipment. It provides high-quality line-level output for an external analog interface. It provides the ability to extract the music list for external display (on my TV or my Alpine's screen). It's also proprietary.

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Military Aerospace & Electronics Show

By Paul Parkinson

Yesterday, I attended the UK's Military Aerospace & Electronics technical conference and exhibition, which was held at the Heritage Motor Centre. The technical conference was split into three technical tracks, which were broadly related to avionics, land systems and technologies; and as is sometimes the case at these conferences I found that I wanted to attend some presentations which were running concurrently!

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OHA, Android and Eclipse

By Doug Gaff

It's been amusing following the fervent speculation around the gPhone, especially the collective sigh of letdown heard 'round the blogosphere when Google announced the Open Handset Alliance and said in a video, "there's no such thing as a single gPhone... we're enabling an entire industry to create thousands of gPhones." Apparently the gadget-hungry among us just wanted a sexy competitor to the iPhone, even though there are already several reasonable contenders and one knock-off.  After the announcement, there was the usual talk about vaporware and who was or wasn't a part of the alliance.  However, things got a lot more exciting today with the public release of the Android SDK.  Yes, Google is doing things in reverse order... putting the platform out first and then letting the mobile devices follow.

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Open Handset Alliance and LiMo – Why both initiatives are here to stay

By Jason Whitmire

It's easy to take the fragmentation of the mobile phone industry for granted. With over 40 different proprietary and Open Source Middleware and Application Frameworks addressing Ultra Low Cost, Entry, Feature and Smart Phone market segments, software costs have exploded and are expected to hit some 25% of the entire Bill of Materials on a mobile phone this year. No wonder mobile network operators are asking the industry to stop the madness and consolidate around a limited number of pre-defined platforms.

Many operators very clearly see Microsoft, Symbian and one to two versions of Linux as the only future software platforms that will comprise their terminal roadmap.  Linux is unique in that most Tier 1 OEMs – with the exception of Nokia – plan to gradually replace the proprietary software addressing the feature phone segments (where by far the most volumes of phones are shipped today and in the future).

With this in mind, two juggernauts – Open Handset Alliance and LiMo – promise to alter the landscape for the third software platform – Linux – for good. The LiMo Foundation’s goal is to defragment the Linux handset market by creating a Linux-based mobile platform that lowers development costs, increases flexibility, and yields differentiated devices. The goal of the Open Handset Alliance is to deliver solutions to enable complete open software, open devices, and an open ecosystem. Are these movements destined for perpetual conflict?

Integrated Modular Smartphone?

By Paul Parkinson

The title of this blog might suggest that I've got mixed up between Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) and consumer devices, but if you bear with me, I'll try to explain why I think there are some parallels.

I was recently given a shiny new smartphone (wikipedia), which will enable me to keep up to date with important emails when I'm out of the office, rather than get a couple of days behind which can happen  sometimes when I'm travelling.

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Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit

By Glenn Seiler

Today was the first day of the inaugural Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. In case you don’t remember the Linux Foundation was formed as merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. The Collaboration Summit represents the first face-to-face meeting of the members of this new consortium. For many members that were previously very active in the OSDL there has been a lot of anticipation and anxiety about how the new organization will represent all the Linux community – those of us in the Device Software market as well as the mainstream Enterprise market.

I have to say this first day has been a very pleasant surprise. There have been some really good panel and keynote presentations. In particular the first panel included the prominent kernel maintainers and kernel developers including Andrew Morton, James Bottomley, Chris Wright, Ted Tso and Greg KH. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, gave the keynote discussion.

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Open Standards, who needs them?

By Mike Deliman

I've blown a horn or two about Open Standards, and what they can buy you.  I'm proud of where my employer adheres to, helps promote, and even helps reform and enhance open standards. It's interesting to see this morning's announcement about Apple's Leopard build achieving cert [PDF Document].

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Police Drone

By Paul Parkinson

Just to avoid any confusion, I want to make it clear that this blog ('Police drone') has nothing to do with the forthcoming world tour by the rock band The Police, but rather the forthcoming trial of an unmanned air vehicle (UAV) by the Merseyside Police force in the UK for "tackling anti-social behaviour and public disorder" ( 'Pilotless police drone takes off', BBC News). 

The BBC News story, and a related article 'Police spy in the sky fuels 'Big Brother' fears' (The Telegraph) focus on the use of the technology in reducing crime, and also the increasing use of surveillance in society, which is a somewhat controversial issue in the UK at the moment as it has the most CCTV cameras of any European country.

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Military Avionics Technology Exhibition, UK

By Paul Parkinson

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Military Avionics Technology Exhibition arranged by the UK MOD, and held at Defence Equipment and Support Agency's Abbey Wood headquarters. This  was an impressive venue, although I don't think I quite got used to the 'Bomb Shelter' signs on the deep walls of the lecture theatre and exhibition hall no matter how often I glanced at them.

The event started with a talk by Air Cdre George Baker, who discussed a number of issues related to through-life capability, which was a recurring theme in the subsequent industry presentations. I often find at these sort of events, that some of the presentations will bring up something completely new and/or unexpected, and this was no exception.

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Evolving Architecture Standards Race On

By Paul Tingey

On Wednesday of last week I had the chance to present at the Evolving Architecture Standards Conference in the UK. The event was focused on the ATCA, AMC and MicroTCA standards and gave delegates the chance to learn more about the evolution, capabilities and potential uses of these technologies.

Apart from presentations from representatives of Intel, Motorola, PICMG, Schroff and myself from Wind River, delegates also had the chance to take part in hands-on and tutorials lessons from Intel, Schroff and Wind River. There was also a day long exhibition featuring about 15 companies offering ATCA and MicroTCA related products.

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Autonomous military robots

By Paul Parkinson

In an earlier blog, 'A robot in every home', I commented on some of the issues related to the development of robotics software, in particular in relation to open standards and safety-criticality. This was in the context of domestic and industrial robots. Now it seems that the issue which is causing debate in the scientific community is prospect of deployment of autonomous decision-making military robots  ('Robot future poses hard questions', BBC News).

There have been significant advances in the development of robotic systems for military applications in recent years, the DARPA Grand Challenges in 2004 & 2005 having been successful in encouraging the advancement of autonomous systems for battlefield environments. Later this year, the DARPA Urban Challenge, as its name suggests, will present different technical challenges, as the autonomous vehicles will need to manoeuvre in mock city environment  "executing simulated military supply missions while merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections, and avoiding obstacles."

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Avionics 2007 Amsterdam

By Paul Parkinson

In my previous post I mentioned that I was heading off to Amsterdam for the Avionics 2007 event, so I thought I should post some comments on the exhibition and conference. The exhibition was pretty focused, with a good mix of COTS hardware and software suppliers, and systems integrators. Walking around the exhibition a couple of things struck me.

Firstly, that there seems to have been a significant amount of consolidation amongst the COTS hardware suppliers recently, with companies such as Curtiss Wright Embedded and  GE Fanuc Embedded now able to supply not only rugged single board computers (SBCs), but a vast range of building blocks needed to build a complete avionics hardware platform, including sensor I/O modules, avionics databuses and even graphics displays.

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Eclipse - Babel fish for engineers?

By Paul Parkinson

In the recent blog More Eclipse News, Alex Wilson commented on how Eclipse is becoming increasingly pervasive throughout the software development life cycle.

Alex mentioned that the seamless integration of these tools through Eclipse makes life easier for developers (which I interpreted as: single user interface (UI), consistent look & feel, improved productivity, etc., etc.), but I believe that there's also another important benefit which is perhaps less obvious.

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More Eclipse news

By Alex Wilson

Following on from my last blog, I see that  RTI has also joined the Eclipse Framework.

This bring to the Eclipse life cycle model RTI's excellent tool for looking at distributed systems using RTI's DDS through Eclipse Perspectives. You can read more about DDS at RTI's web site

This means you now have the capability in Eclipse to move from UML all the way through coding and testing, to OS deployment and now middleware with distributed systems - What a  cool environment!

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World's Most Advanced Warship

By Paul Parkinson

Last week saw the official launch (BBC News) of HMS Dauntless, the second of the state-of-the-art Type 45 air defence destroyer. This follows almost exactly a year after the launch of the first ship, HMS Daring, which is due to enter into service with the UK Royal Navy in 2009.

The Type 45 destroyer will replace the ageing Type 42 destroyers (such as HMS Gloucester which successfully performed an air defence role in the Gulf War), and will provide significantly greater capability, including providing close in-shore air defence cover to land forces. Type 45 achieves these capabilities through a number of state-of-the-art technologies: the SAMPSON Multi-Function Radar (MFR), the sophisticated Principal Anti-Air Missile Systems (PAAMS), and advanced sonar and countermeasures, and signature reduction technology. (I will resist the temptation to bore you with the finer points of the technical details, but I will recommend the following web pages on the Wikipedia, Royal Navy and Naval Technology websites).

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Tools standardisation

By Alex Wilson

Changing tracks for a moment I couldn't help but pick up on one of my Google Alerts this morning regarding what is essentially the technology behind DSO standardisation - ECLIPSE.

Here is what I read

Pluginfest Day Two By Adrian Taylor

Some of the tools available from WindRiver, for example, are just light years ahead of what’s available for Symbian OS. ... The QNX and WindRiver tools are terrific. WindRiver’s memory profiling stuff in particular blew me away. ...

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A robot in every home

By Paul Parkinson

I've been trying to keep track of industry news, and at the moment it seems as to me as if everyone is either blogging about the Apple iPhone  (Engadget blog) or Windows Vista (Windows Vista Team blog). However, the announcement that caught my attention recently was the launch of the 'Microsoft Robotics Studio' (IET).

The story briefly mentions Microsoft's plan to "establish standards for controlling robots", but didn't go into technical details, although I managed to find some useful background in Bill Gates' article  'A robot in every home' (Scientific American).

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Even Bacteria Form Communities

By John Bruggeman

After several days at CES, I was so OVER IT by my final night in Vegas. OVER the crowds, OVER the lines and especially OVER the abundance of cool, new gadgets I live to try out every January. I was “gadgeted-out.” As amusing as it was to hang out in front of the Taser booth where grown adults were waiting in a VERY, long line to voluntarily sacrifice their neuro-muscular systems and experience total bodily incapacitation from the uncontrollable jolt of an extremely painful electrical current device…I was still OVER it. 

With a grueling show schedule behind me, all I wanted to do was hideout in my hotel room, order room service, plow through the 3000+ emails in my inbox and maybe channel surf my way to something interesting on TV that wasn’t a repeat episode of CSI, Law & Order or Cops. As I powered up the laptop and simultaneously started clicking through the channels, I stumbled onto a Nova special about bacterial research and actually watched the entire segment completely engrossed. So much for the 3000 emails…

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Can Automotive learn from Avionics Safety?

By Paul Parkinson

In my previous post on software safety standards, in response to some questions raised by Alex Wilson, I commented on what I believe are signs of convergence between avionics software standards. However, I didn't address Alex's question on whether there is any potential for convergence between avionics and automotive software standards.

Electronic systems have been present in automotive systems for many years now, but they have only really become visible to the driver and passengers with the advent of infotainment systems and driver-assist systems, such as Anti-Lock Braking System and airbag Supplementary Restraint Systems (wikipedia).

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Safety Standards Convergence?

By Paul Parkinson

In a recent post on software certification, Alex Wilson asked why there are so many software safety certification standards? The current situation is of course due to historical reasons, and this has resulted in some interesting anomalies. However, I think there is some reason for cautious optimism, as there appears to be more increasingly widespread acceptance of standards in recent years, and there is also a degree of convergence between standards, at least in some cases.

The RTCA DO-178B standard was originally developed for the safety critical software on civil aircraft certified by the US FAA, but in recent years this has been increasingly adopted by US military aircraft programmes, and subsequently on civil programmes in other countries around the world. (In Europe, civil aircraft are actually developed according to the EUROCAE ED-12B standard, but this is identical to DO-178B).

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RDC in China

By Tomas Evensen

I just came back from a couple of weeks in China. Fascinating country. Besides the usual customer visits, we also held three Regional Development Conferences (RDCs) in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing.

The RDCs were a huge success with on average more than 400 attendees per day. And they were all very interested in hearing about Wind River's latest offerings and future plans.

How do I know they all were interested? Well, my leading indicator was that all seats were taken from the front working towards the back. Somewhat different from your typical American or European conference, where the back seats seem to be the hottest commodity. (BTW, I am of course not indicating that our American and European friends are not interested... Perhaps they have better eye sight).

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Software Certification

By Alex Wilson

I wonder why it is always the case that the period of time just before year end is suddenly very hectic! There must be a universal law about that, something like Murphy's Law...

Anyway, I have just returned from 2 weeks of travel around Italy, Sweden and the US visiting customers and presenting our solutions. I always enjoy meeting folks and seeing what they can do with our software as I love to see the latest and greatest devices; and so I have been negligent in posting to my blog for that time and noticed over the last few weeks some noticeable events have taken place.

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