Wind River Blog Network

A Great Win for Wind River in Network Innovation

By Jessica Schieve

Wind River Intelligent Network Platform just won the Top Embedded Innovation Award of 2013 from Embedded Computing Design magazine. Wind River Intelligent Network Platform, a high performance data plane solution for packet acceleration and deep packet inspection, is able to provide the right combination of innovation that delivers a comprehensive solution for packet performance and network intelligence.  There is some meat on the bone with this one.

Since launching Wind River Intelligent Network Platform in 2012, we’ve received great responses from engineers and project teams representing many of the global tier 1 and 2 network equipment companies.  The first thing everyone wants to know is how fast can the solution can get their specific network application to run.  Once we’ve demonstrated significant packet performance improvement, the next question is how to build-in network intelligence into their existing network element.  

Wind River Intelligent Network Platform consists of three key components that can be utilized as a whole or in different combinations.  The three components include Wind River Application Acceleration Engine, Wind River Content Inspection Engine, and Wind River Flow Analysis Engine. Another way to look at is to think of your network application running faster, smarter, and more secure.  The combination of all three engines gives network equipment providers everything they need to build high performance, competitive applications with the ability to deliver unique and higher value services.

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Back to Reverse Execution

By Jakob Engblom 

Simics reverse execution and reverse debugging is a unique and very powerful feature of the simulator. In this blog post and accompanying video, we will look at what exactly it is you can do with reverse execution in Simics. It is not just a matter of running backwards to a breakpoint or stepping instructions (pick up my 2012 S4D article for more on reverse debugging). Reverse execution fundamentally is about undoing arbitrary operations on the target and going back to a prior state from a previous point in time. Furthermore, with Simics, you can go back in time and choose to do something different than you did in the original execution. In this blog post, we will take a look at just what you can do with reverse.

The basic operation of reverse execution is to stop at some point in a system execution, go backwards to visit the past and see what happens, and then go forward again. Reverse execution lets you go back and forth over the execution to investigate a particular execution path in detail.

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Reliability….the key constant in network transformation

By Jessica Schieve 

Wind River recently conducted a webinar on the topic of network transformation and the growing trend around building greater intelligence.   The webinar discussed the results of a survey we commissioned through Light Reading exploring the different facets of network intelligence: packet acceleration, content inspection, flow analysis and traffic shaping, and network virtualization.  It was one of our highest attended events in recent months.  An archived version of the webinar can be heard here.

The webinar highlighted three significant results from the survey 1) advancements in multicore technology are making network transformation and network intelligence possible 2) the time is right for software to pave the way for higher network performance, greater security, and new services that take advantage of network intelligence, and 3) the majority of network equipment providers want a common software platform that can be used for multiple products. 

During the webinar we polled the audience on what they consider their greatest challenge in adopting a software-enabled network intelligent strategy.   Here are the results of the poll:

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VxWorks: Delivering on the Promise of Multicore

By Bill Graham

Wind River had a big week on the multicore front which included a significant presence at last week’s Multicore Developer Conference. In addition to keynoting the event, Wind River delivered two presentations on making the most out of multicore hardware platforms. 

A key takeaway from the event is that the hardware has come a long way -- in fact, we demonstrated VxWorks on the latest generation hardware such as the Freescale QorIQ T4240, a 12 core, 24 thread device that is a processing powerhouse. Also of note – we demonstrated the identical software on our Wind River Simics virtual system simulation of the Freescale QorIQ T4240.

What was critical about our message at the conference was that your runtime platform choice makes a big difference in terms of the amount of flexibility you have architecting your system. The goal of these sessions was to illustrate how architecture choice is key to maximizing the processing power provided by these new hardware platforms.

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Securing Critical Infrastructure with MILS

By Paul Chen

On February 12, the White House released the Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21), Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience. The DHS website describes PPD-21 as “advancing a national policy to strengthen and maintain secure, functioning, and resilient critical infrastructure.” Sixteen different critical infrastructure sectors are identified, including: Chemical, Communications, Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare and Public Health, Food and Agriculture, Nuclear Reactors, Transportation, and Water and Wastewater Systems.

On the same day PPD-21 was released, President Obama also signed Executive Order 13636 for “Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.” The Executive Order directs NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to develop a framework for “reducing cyber risks to critical infrastructure,” for which they have issued an RFI and plan a workshop in late May.

And on March 26, the BSI (Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik, the German Federal Office for Information Security) published the Protection Profile for the Gateway of a Smart Metering System. Such devices will securely collect, process, and store information from smart meters, adding security to smart electricity distribution grids. The protection profile notes that the threat from a remote cyberattack is much higher than that from a local physical attack, since the attacker in network has the potential to compromise not just one, but many components of the infrastructure, or even the corresponding grid.

These developments highlight the focus on improving critical infrastructure security as attacks from cyber-terrorism have increased over the last decade and, alarmingly, in the past year on power, water, and nuclear systems. A recent report states that, indeed, most cyber-attacks now target critical infrastructure, moving “away from hacking and financially motivated crime” to attacks to “deny, disrupt, and destroy” service. For most of us, even the most destructive cyber-attacks like Stuxnet are fairly remote and don’t impact us; but if critical infrastructure services are denied, disrupted, or destroyed, cyber-attacks could become devastatingly personal.

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Analyze this…Accelerate that…

By Steve Konish

In just three short months, the engineering team at Wind River has added new, amazing capabilities to the Wind River Intelligent Network Platform.  These enhancements to the platform allow applications to go even deeper and faster than ever before.    

When we first launched the platform, it included two data plane engines for packet acceleration and pattern matching.  The two engines together created an incredible software-enabled solution to provide high-performance deep packet inspection (DPI) for network applications.  We’ve now added a third data plane engine, the Flow Analysis Engine (FAE), which allows applications to incorporate even greater network intelligence.  The Flow Analysis Engine offers complete visibility into network traffic in real time, including flow classification, protocol and application identification, and metadata extraction.

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The Advent of Multi-core MILS

By Paul Parkinson

It has been a rather long time since my previous blog post. I intended to post a blog before the holidays regarding our partner Curtiss-Wright's announcement about VxWorks MILS support on the VPX6-187, but I simply ran out of time! So here it is as my first blog post of 2013.

The Curtiss-Wright new release was actually quite a game changer. To the casual reader, it may just appear to be about the release of another board support package (BSP) on a leading-edge COTS processor card, but the fact that this BSP supports multi-core for a MILS architecture is what makes this announcement so significant.

When the MILS software architecture was proposed in 1984 by the computer scientist Dr. John Rushby, microprocessors at the time were inherently single-core, and computing performance advances were being driven by clock speed increases and die size, at a rate following Moore's Law.

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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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Analyzing Manycore Scaling with Simics

By Jakob Engblom

In my previous blog post on multicore scaling investigations with Simics, I tested a simple parallel program on a variety of machines. The scaling obtained was not particularly impressive, especially not on a 60-core target machine. In this post, we will use the Simics timeline view to look a bit closer at what is going on inside the target machines. In particular, with respect to operating system scheduling of the target threads. 

Before we look at the runs that indicated a lack of scaling, we should look at a well-behaved case to make sure we have something to compare to. For this, I brought up the 5-core heavy load experiment again, and reran it. Some things in the target setup had changed compared to the last blog post, so the scaling of the length 100 line is a bit different (once again showing the sensitivity of this program to noise and initial conditions just like it would be on physical hardware). If we look at the behavior for a nicely scaling line and compare it to the timeline view plotting the active threads, we can see that nice scaling does indeed correspond to good parallelism.

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Got DPDK? We Can Help You!

By Glenn Seiler

If you’ve purchased a communications processor from Intel in the last year, there is a strong likelihood you are familiar with the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit. Intel DPDK, as it is commonly referred to here at Wind River, is a set of libraries that help applications transmit and receive packet data as efficiently as possible on Intel Xeon multicore processors.  System architects and designers of networking applications can leverage the Intel DPDK to accelerate packets through layer 3 to create a fast path for packets to build high performance applications.  Mastering the fast path opens the door to a world of new high-value intelligent applications like deep packet inspection (DPI), and security.

But mastering the fast path is no easy task.  This can be especially true if you are considering migration from another architecture or protocol stack to take advantage of the increased power of Intel architecture (IA). Nearly every communications company I have talked to over the last few years is starting to consider Intel architecture for data plane applications as well as the traditional applications and control plane typically that IA is used for. The good news is you don’t have to make this transition  alone.  Wind River is now making our team of technical experts available to support any Intel DPDK project regardless of underlying operating system.  Yes, Wind River will support Intel DPDK application development on any Linux whether it is Wind River Linux, your own in-house distribution, or a third party commercial Linux distribution. Check out our latest news.

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Avionics Europe 2012 Report

By Paul Parkinson

I've just got back from the Avionics Europe 2012 conference and exhibition which was held in Munich.

The theme of this year's conference was 'Common Sky: Operating in One Air Space' focussing on the growth in air traffic across Europe, the challenges arising for air traffic management and navigation, and the development of SESAR air traffic management technologies.

I was keen to hear to how changes to the high-level policies would drive regulatory changes and drive technology requirements.

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Introducing Performance Studio

By Emeka Nwafor

What is Performance Studio? Is it:

1. Some kind of hair product

2. A new "clinic" for MLB players

3. Full name: : Wind River Linux Performance Studio for Intel® Architecture; a new add-on product for Wind River Linux that helps you get the most performance out of your embedded Linux device software running on Intel hardware 

If you correctly answered "3", give yourself a round of applause.

Our portfolio of development solutions have long addressed a broad set of embedded device development concerns in the areas of system definition, bring-up, software construction, integration & test, and maintaining and retro-fitting embedded device software and hardware. Now, with the introduction of Performance Studio, we not only have the broad development solutions portfolio but also further extend it with capabilities that enable us to go deeper into the platform and obtain the best performance out of embedded Linux software running on Intel® Core™, Xeon™, and Atom™ processors. 

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Feeling the need for speed and making it happen

By Mark Guinther

“I feel the need…The need for speed!!”  Quoting old movies is where my similarities to Tom Cruise end, but it is a relevant line for today’s networking equipment.  Faster applications is one of the last steps in getting faster results to subscribers, resulting in happy subscribers which means happy service providers, happy service providers mean happy equipment providers, and… well, you get the point: Everybody is happier when their network runs faster. However, it’s getting tougher given the ever-increasing flood of data on today’s networks.    

Bigger, faster pipes are a start, but you can have the best infrastructure plumbing in the world and still have poor performance if your system and applications are a bottleneck. 

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Exciting Times - Virtually!

By Chris Ault

It's an exciting time for embedded virtualization at Wind River!  We were recently named the embedded virtualization market leader by VDC Research Group.  In VDC’s 2011 ‘Virtualization for Mobile and Embedded Systems’ report, Wind River achieved the highest share of the market in 2010 with greater than 30 percent of total market revenue.

In addition to this significant recognition, today we announced updates to our embedded virtualization offering. We released updates to our guest operating systems – VxWorks and Wind River Linux, as well as updates to Wind River Hypervisor and Wind River Workbench tools.

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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. 

 

Scalability: the key to product line success

By Bill Graham

An important requirement for an RTOS such as VxWorks is scalability. What this really means is being usable in many different types of devices, from small memory constrained, low power devices (possibly battery powered, hand held, mobile) to large scale systems, multiple nodes networked together, possibly using multicore in a multi-OS environment. Scaling down is equally important as scaling up. As my colleague Felix Baum had recently posted, flexibility is also critically important part of the equation, an RTOS must be configurable as needed by the developer and run on the hardware platforms they choose, and make the most of the hardware capabilities.

Why not just buy a specific RTOS for each project? This isn't really a viable option anymore. Our customers are looking for a tools and run-time platform they can rely on for a product line rather than an individual product. In the end this turns out the be the best solution both in terms of costs but also in reducing risk  and meeting difficult time-to-market targets. A common platform means reuse of code, expertise, tools and most importantly, "one neck to wring", one vendor and one point of contact to solve your problems.

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Autonomy and Robotic Advancement

By Mike Deliman

A few months ago at the Robotics Virtual Trade Show, in my presentation I spoke about the evolution of robotic systems.  One thing I predicted was as time goes on, robots will become more independent and autonomous, performing more of the work humans and mainframe-style systems have traditionally performed.  

Among the robots I talked about were robots similar to NASA's 
Stardust Spacecraft  Stardust is currently on course for a Valentine's Day rendezvous with Comet Temple-1.  Stardust includes a package that performs autonomous navigation, d to help keep the craft on it's flight path with reduced intrusion from ground-based systems.  Since Stardust is so far out from earth, there is significant delay in round-trip communications.  Stardust is able to detect problems in trajectory and perform course correction maneuvers on its own.

Last week, Northrop Grumman had  first-flight for an evolution in Un-maned Aerial Vehicles.  The 
X47B UCAS   is an autonomous unmanned flight system.  It is not a wireless-joystick system.  It flies itself, taking off, figuring a course to it's way points, landing.  Without human intervention.

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Safety-Critical Systems Symposium 2011

By Paul Parkinson

I'm looking forward to the 19th annual Safety-Critical Systems Symposium which is being held in held in the UK next week.

The conference programme covers a range of subjects including safety cases, testing of safety-critical systems, updates to safety standards, and technologies. On the Thursday afternoon, I will be presenting a paper Safety, Security and Multicore.

Wind River will be participating in the exhibition which is being held on the Wednesday, and we will have a live demo of VxWorks MILS 2.0 running on the stand. So why not pop by to discuss your safety & security requirements?

 

Embedded Virtualization Opens New Possibilities

By Mark Hermeling

One of the things that stands out in many customer visits that I do is that embedded virtualization often enables possibilities that the customer never thought possible. This of course is a good thing, it may enable them to put a new product to market that the customer had never thought of. In a few cases I have seen customers use virtualization to shift their business models from shipping custom hardware to shipping software only using COTS boards. Virtualization in this case is used to provide the customization that they formerly needed hardware for.

I went on a customer call earlier this year to a customer that was looking to go to multi-core. The customer was building a networking product and was using VxWorks on a single core Intel processor and wanted the additional processing power that a dual or quad-core could provide. They wanted to go to multi-core and came to Wind River to see what their options were. 

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Virtualization on Handsets or not?

By Mark Hermeling

Here is an interesting article, continuing a discussion thats has been going on for a long time on mobile virtualization. It argues the case that a single mobile phone can run multiple operating systems using virtualization. A bit of googling will show that this is indeed already the case. However, there is a big caveat typically that you do not see exposed. 

Mobile phones have two big constraints: processing power and battery power. Typically one operating systems is the 'phone operating system' and the other OS is more general purpose. With 'phone OS' I mean that the OS has to handle a lot of the time critical tasks, sometimes even to the level of passing data off to/from the signal processing side for communication with the antenna and the wireless network.

The signal processing side is very time sensitive and hence it is important that the time constraints are met and data is delivered/picked up on the right time. This makes it that typically the virtualization layer will have to be aware of this and it makes the solution not a general virtualization solution, but a highly device customized solution.

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Migrating to Multi-core using Embedded Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

So, let's assume that you are currently on a single-core board and you would like to explore the possibilities of delivering a next generation device using multi-core technologies. There are a lot of different ways to approach this. The most elaborate involve doing an architecture study into ways in which you could evolve your current device architecture. This study would need to be approached from both a technical, as well as a business level.

The funny thing with software is that 'virtually' anything is possible, but the trick is to find approaches that are not only technically possible, but that provide business benefits, usually in a short time-frame. Part of the equation is the amount of work required to build this next generation of device.

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Wind River Network Acceleration Platform Wins Best Software Award

By Jessica Schieve

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 ATCA Summit Best of Show Awards ceremony where Wind River was presented the Best Software award for its Wind River Network Acceleration Platform.  
This is a major accomplishment for a industry solution that was launched less than a year ago. The panel of judges included industry editors as well as networking and telecom ecosystem peers.

So why would Wind River Network Acceleration Platform win top honors?  Let's consider the following. As I sat in a presentation about the future of 40G applications, one speaker from a prominent COTS board company discussed six different approaches to achieving the capacity and throughput needed to make 40G a reality.

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Embedded Virtualization in Gaming

By Mark Hermeling

A few weeks ago I found myself in the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. My reason for being there was a seminar that Wind River was organizing together with Intel and AVNET specifically focussed on companies that build gaming. The main topics were graphics, manageability and of course, virtualization.

I am always eager to fold real-life examples into my presentations, hence I decided to try my luck at some of the slot machines in the Hard Rock Hotel under the disguise of 'domain study'. And I have to say, the state of slot machines has progressed significantly since the last time that I was in Vegas many years ago. The top of the line machines had multiple 30" inch displays with either static or moving imagery, they had player tracking, surround sound, some of them even had imagery over the rolls themselves.

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IMA on Simics: An Interview with Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux

By Jakob Engblom

After Summer, I have been in contact with Tennessee Carmel-Veilleux at the École de technologie supérieure in Quebec, who has been doing some really cool work with Simics.  Tennessee has learnt Simics very quickly, and has been very clever in how to apply Simics to the research problems he has encountered. In this interview, he tells us some more about his research and use of Simics. I prefix my comments with "JE", and his with "TCV".

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Embedded Virtualization and Multi-Core

By Mark Hermeling

VDC has released a recent report showing that multi-core is making fast inroads in embedded systems and we are seeing that at Wind River as well. There are exciting new possibilities with these chips, we have never had this much processing power in such small packages.

Take for example Freescale's new P4080 chip, 8 cores, 2 memory busses and a wealth of peripherals that are designed for multicore usage (such as the data path acceleration architecture (DPAA)). There are many things to consider with this new chip, I have blogged before about the many primary multi-core configurations available from SMP to uAMP, to sAMP to core virtualized. You have to consider partitioning, or virtualizing cores, memory and devices.

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Intuitive & Efficient Debug of Multi-core Systems

By Brian Finkel

I reflect on a recent visit with my 84-year old Aunt Honey. As you might expect, she is not an avid cell phone user. She wanted help entering contacts into her phone. She has a basic phone so we had to enter text using the “9-up” keypad. Her objective is to make phone calls by selecting someone’s name instead of typing the telephone number.   

The event had me thinking about the way we used to make telephone calls – using an address book or a phone list and then typing in the number. In my youth, things weren’t so bad – everyone lived in the same town – with the same area code and only a few prefixes. For each friend you only had to remember the 4 digits and perhaps which prefix to use. Fast forward a few years and with the advent of cell phones, IP telephony, new area codes, and geographically-dispersed friends and family – you now need to remember 10 digits. 10 digits is beyond most people’s working memory (which is typically 7 digits). Address books and phone lists were required. 

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Devices! Devices! Devices!

By Mark Hermeling

That is what embedded systems is all about: handling devices. An embedded software system has input devices and output devices and some amount of software running on operating systems, running on hardware that turn input into output. The trick is to handle the input in a fast an deterministic way and generate output in a fast and deterministic way. Determinism is important all the way through the system, from the device, to the hardware, to the operating system to the software running on the operating system.

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Variable and Deterministic

By Jakob Engblom

A virtual platform like Wind River Simics is generally designed to be deterministic. Determinism brings a host of benefits to users (repeatability of bugs, reverse execution, bug transportation, etc.), but is also easily misunderstood. Quite often, users fear that they will lose an important "feature" of a physical machine - its built-in variation across runs of the same software. If the virtual platform is deterministic, surely it will not expose all the different ways a program can run that you get on a random physical machine? Yes it can.

There is a huge difference between the repeatable determinism of a virtual machine and completely invariant, predictable, predetermined behavior.

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Test Automation Meets Simulation

By Paul Henderson

I'm seeing increasing interest from many companies in using simulation environments with test automation systems to accelerate the testing process. Specifically, putting Wind River Test Management together with Wind River Simics is getting creative juices flowing in industry thought leaders.

Why? Well, development teams have started to realize the benefits of simulation systems for speeding and validating system and software design, and for accelerating software development and debug in advance of hardware availabilty. And even when hardware is available, systems like Simics provide tremendous access and control to speed analysis and diagnsotics.

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