By Jakob Engblom
I have a paper about "Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints" to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Wind River Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right.
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.
By Paul Henderson
As I've mentioned before, we've been working with IBM Rational for some time around quality management automation. Both companies see the skyrocketing software content and architectural complexity in the embedded device market as creating a tipping point where companies will not be able to continue with business as usual.
Product development teams will need to take a more managed and automated approach to quality that spans across the lifecycle and access into the devices under test. This is particularly true in markets that require strict adherance to standards and compliance regulations.
We put together a joint whitepaper on this subject downloadable from here. And we are also having a joint web seminar next week on Tuesday Aug 31 at 2pm EDT. You can register for this event here.
By Mark Hermeling
I have always found the difference between Type 1 vs Type 2 hypervisors rather uninteresting. In short, a type-1 hypervisor is a hypervisor that has direct access to the hardware, where a type-2 hypervisor executes inside an operating system. Most hypervisors are type-1 hypervisors, including IT hypervisors such as VMWare, Xen, KVM and such. Type-2 hypervisors are applications like VMWare Workstation (or Fusion), Parallels, .... The distinction between type-1 versus type-2 is really not as useful as most people think. There is a good blog article by Anthony Liguori that describes this as well, complete with references, the article is a bit old, but still correct.
By Bill Graham
In the third and final part of my interview with Professor Glauco Caurin we discuss multicore and virtualization and why they are working with us on their research projects.
Q: Are your students learning about multi-core processors and programming? What about multi-OS systems including virtualization, i.e. systems that have more than one OS on a single processor?
By Mark Hermeling
Two good blog posts from some of my colleagues at Freescale. One on Heading Into Hyperspace: Hypervisor and Multi-core design by Jim Trudeau and one by Rob Oshana on the Top 3 Keys to Multi-core software development. Jim talks about the multi-core aspects mostly from Freescale's P4080 perspective, an elegant, powerful and very popular processor in the networking space. The P4080 has not only many processors, it is truly designed for multicore with multiple peripherals (multiple PCI hosts) and multiple memory controllers for example to reduce contention.
By Mark Hermeling
This topic invariably comes up when talking to customers, unfortunately, there is not just one, but several primary use cases. There are multiple ways to look into the various use cases. The one I like best is to look at generic drivers. An alternative is to look at actual usages in the various industries.
By Paul Henderson
RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices.
By Paul Henderson
In my last posting I mentioned I'd be running a webinar with James Grenning on Agile testing. James is a recognized expert and frequent speaker on the topic of software development and one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
We talked about the case for agility where today's embedded software projects are inevitably faced with changing requirements and market conditions that cause unplanned, mid-course corrections. The result is what went in is often not what was expected to come out. Testing folks are the tail trying to wag the dog as they try to test in quality at the end of the project.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the final installment in my series about our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about what test tools they use today and where they are investing in test automation. Given the high cost of product failure, accelerating complexity and reduced schedules the industry is turning to more test automation in 2010 to help address these problems. The top investment are moving to new tools that can help test teams and their management better understand how well they are testing, better focus their efforts on the areas needing testing, and reduce cycle time through more automation.
By Jessica Schieve
Telecom and Network equipment providers are facing huge challenges to build and deploy products that can meet the growing performance and capacity demands while also delivering the service levels customers have come to expect. In the rapidly evolving wireless and wireline broadband markets, multi-core technologies have become a tremendous force that is impacting the entire value chain of industry suppliers (the village) and how it is responds to meet these challenges.
Wind River and LSI’s village just got bigger, stronger, and smarter. Today, Wind River and LSI announced a long-term strategic collaboration to optimize and tightly integrate their multi-core hardware and software portfolios. LSI’s Axxia Communication Processors will be integrated with Wind River’s industry leading Linux and VxWorks platforms and development tools. Now, equipment providers can leverage this collaboration effort as a powerful advantage to build faster, more intelligent, and highly competitive network products.
By Paul Henderson
I’m continuing my series on our embedded device industry software testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
By Paul Henderson
Here’s the next installment in my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected] and I will send it to you.
In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.
By Paul Henderson
Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected]and I will send it to you.
In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.
By Mark Hermeling
Bill-of-material is something that is important in many devices and I have argued before that virtualization can help with this. Say you have a medical device like an MRI scanner, it is not uncommon that this device has three processors that collaborate. One processor, often in a separate box like an industrial PC, runs MS Windows and is the operator interface, possibly with touch-screen GUI. This is where the results are displayed.
By Jakob Engblom
The new Freescale QorIQ P5020 SoC that was announced this week at the Freescale Technology Forum means that yet another chip family has now moved to 64 bits from 32 bits. This is a familiar scenario that has been played out many times before, starting in the mid-1990s as Sun, IBM and MIPS upgraded their server processor architectures to 64 bits. Before that, we had Intel extending the x86 family from 16 bits to 32 bits and IBM extending the System/360 architecture from 24 bits to 31 bits. Each time, the changed caused software pain for a while as the software is updated to work in the new world with more bits to use. It is also something that Simics has helped with in the past.
By Mark Hermeling
Well, I surely hope you haven't, hospitals are not my favorite places, they are a fertile ground for embedded systems though. Many of the devices in the hospital consist of an instrument part and a user interface (Human Machine Interface). The device could be an MRI scanner, or a a relatively simple blood analyzer. The Human Machine Interface on these devices control the instrument(s) provide feedback on the measurements and possibly interacts with a back office system.
By Jakob Engblom
A recent
article at Ars Technica describes yet another security flaw in
Windows. Nothing much new in that respect, but this is indeed an
interesting attack in that it is enabled by using multicore hardware. It
is not practical on a single processor, demonstrating once again how
multicore is fundamentally different from multitasking on a single
processor.
The attack targets software that hooks Windows kernel code to do additional work, such as anti-virus software. The idea is to get bad data into a hooked system call, by replacing input data after it has been validated by the hook but before it gets consumed by the kernel.
By Paul Henderson
I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.
The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest. So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails.
By Mark Hermeling
I have been back in Ottawa now for just over a week after my 5 week trip through Europe and am working through my notes from the past month. And what a month it has been, in an earlier post I jokingly declared 2010 the year of embedded virtualization and this is certainly ringing true.
An overview of the activities of last month will present a decent picture of the status of embedded virtualization and the interest.
By Paul Henderson
Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.
Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.
By Paul Henderson
Today marked the opening of the annual IBM Rational Software developer conference, this year called Innovate 2010, here in Orlando Florida.
The 4 day event is covering a range of topics on both IT and embedded systems software development and test lifecycle tools and technologies. Wind River has a presence on the exhibit floor and a number of conference tracks. The mood is very positive at this 13th conference. 4000 attendees are here, a 20% growth over 2009.
The show opened with several IBM executives led by Dr. Danny Sabbah, GM IBM Rational Software reviewing IBM's "Smarter Planet" strategy including "systems and software econometrics". Dr. Sabbah described how software innovations are now driving the world, particularly as related to intelligent products and services.
By Eddie Glenn
Developing large systems is a lot like trying to get an appreciation of the Amazon when you’re standing beneath a single tree in the middle of it. Sure, there’s a lot that you can find out about that single tree. You can look at its trunk, its leaves, and its branches. You could take soil measurements around the tree to determine if it is getting the proper nutrients.
But, the health of that single tree is often determined by what’s going on around it. If your perspective is limited to just that tree, then you’re going to miss the jungle. You won’t see how the various streams feed into the rivers, how one part of the ecosystem feeds another part which feeds another part. Simply put, if that single tree is in distress, how can you fix it without looking at what’s going on around it?
By Paul Parkinson
There's an interesting editorial column 'Multicore Processing Becomes the New Mainstream' in the latest edition of COTS Journal. Jeff Child discusses how multicore processors, after becoming all pervasive in the desktop and server market, are now becoming the norm for embedded aerospace and defence systems. He also shares some insights into why the transition to multicore is necessary, and provides an example of the deployment of multicore in the Aegis Modernisation Programme (AMOD).
Rather tantalizingly, Jeff only mentions software architectures in his final paragraph (maybe that's a subject for a future editorial), where he contrasts the use of Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) on multicore devices with tiled processors (which can be massively parallel architectures).
By Mark Hermeling
Events such as ESC in San Jose this week are a great way to talk to a lot of customers in a very short timespan. Hence, a great place to be for a product manager like myself. The conversations show a clear difference between leaders in multicore adoption and followers of that adoption.
The discussions with the followers typically start of a bit timid. They are often afraid of multicore and see it as a necessary evil. After a while, they warm up and they start to see that the migration does not need to be very complicated, yes, it is work, but work that can be managed and controlled.
By Jakob Engblom
As you might have seen, Wind River recently acquired Simics, a product
formerly sold by Virtutech. My colleagues Michel Genard and Bill Graham recently blogged on the topic.
Simics can have a huge impact on the product development processes, time-to-market and quality. Apart from the cool things that Simics does to improve the development process, it is also a very interesting technology in and by itself.
By Bill Graham
Wind River's CTO, Tomas Evensen gave a keynote
at the Multicore Expo in San Jose entitled "Surviving the Software
Avalanche: Simplifying Multicore". There certainly has been much
discussion of multicore by many people (myself included) over the years
but we are getting to a point now that we are seeing multicore use cases
coalescing in the marketplace.
I think a lot of us learn better by example and when we see multicore used in a real customer use cases, we see the benefit and value much more.
By Mark Guinther
I have crossed to the other side of the generation gap. While growing up in Michigan, I remember my parents telling me about their primitive childhood experiences: walking 4 miles through the snow each way to school, uphill both ways, no TV, no microwave oven, only one family car…
Now my own kids stare in disbelief when I tell them that I grew up in a home with only one phone attached to a wall, no worldwide web, no laptop, and no cell phones with text messaging. They visualize me as a caveman back in the Stone Age.
By Mark Hermeling
Customers often ask me in my opinion as to what their path to
multi-core should be. Invariably I ask them two things. 1) Describe your
current hardware architecture, your next hardware architecture and what
your hardware architecture will look like in 3 years; 2) Describe your
current software architecture and any plans you have to evolve it.
This leads to interesting discussions, most customers can draw their hardware architectures, some can white board their software architectures easily, some have more problems, but I have a strong feeling that their drawing differs significantly from the actual implementation.
By Mark Hermeling
Looking forward to my trip to ESC Sillicon Valley next week. It is promising to be a busy show, especially since ESC is now combined with the Multicore expo. I just leafed through the agenda (in the form of a Nxtbook) and found a large number of sessions that I want to attend, experience show though that I'll probably be too busy talking to customer to attend sessions, which is a good problem to have of course.
I am hosting a 4 hour session (with several of my colleagues) on Multicore Demystified on Tuesday afternoon 2.30-7pm (there will be refresments!) in the Hilton Plaza Room. Do stop by either the session, or our booth at Multicore Expo for a chat if you want to brain storm about your next generation devices.
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