Wind River Blog Network

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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Avionics 2012 Conference

By Paul Parkinson

It's been a long time since my previous blog, as unfortunately I've been engrossed in a number of projects!

However, I have just got time to mention that I'm really looking forward to the Avionics Europe conference in Munich on 21-22 March. The conference programme is pretty packed, covering cockpit avionics and technologies for civil and military aircraft; and aircraft, spacecraft and UAV sensor payloads, diagnostics and certification.

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Using Static Analysis to Improve Product Quality, Earlier and Cheaper

By Bill Graham

Fixing bugs is expensive. Fixing bugs is more expensive the later you leave them, in fact, its been shown to cost a magnitude higher with each major phase of development. The famous defect cost chart from Capers Jones shows the cost of a bug going from $25 at the coding phase to $16,000 in development.  Not only that, but most of the bugs are introduced into the system at this stage yet very little of them are found. Logic says we should fix them earlier to save money.

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Making a Faulty Serial Port

By Jakob Engblom 

As noted before, one common use case for Simics is doing fault injection.  Fault injection is typically added to an existing system without changing it, since the goal is to maintain a fundamentally fast simulator when not injecting faults.  There are a range of mechanisms available in Simics to implement fault injection. This blog post will take a look at two such mechanisms and how they are used in the context of injecting faults on a serial port.

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Android Security – making sense of all the choices

By Chris Buerger

Last week’s public release of the Security Enhanced (SE) Android project and associated source code is hailed by many as an important foundational step to add a new set of options to create secure Android devices. While the recent release of the code base by the National Security Agency (NSA) is familiar territory for Android experts such as Wind River who have been designing and implementing comprehensive security layers to a wide spectrum of Android devices for a few years now, the portrayal of this development in the media as an all-encompassing security solution grossly oversimplifies the complex subject matter that Android security represents.

Simply speaking, compiling and flashing the SE Android code base on to your Nexus S will not make it completely 'secure.'

Wind River has been enabling Android devices for close to five years now. Based on that experience and over a decade of pioneering mobile Linux-based devices, four key security-related points stand out.

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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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Adding Android to the Embedded Mix

By Dan Noal

Wind River just hosted a webinar titled, “Adding Android to the Embedded Mix" and saw a great attendee turnout. There were a broad spectrum of companies represented, not just the traditional smartphone and tablet manufacturers.  This is a clear indication of the interest to use in Android for devices in all market segments.  In fact, one of the most frequently asked questions is, what other embedded markets have you seen or do you see having an Android play? 

Wind River has been working with customers on Android for a wide range of applications and markets, and our efforts continue to expand.  We’ve worked on many projects including enterprise IP phones from the likes of Avaya and in-vehicle infotainment systems from Clarion.  

Increasingly, Android is finding its way into markets like point-of-sale, fit-to-purpose industrial style tablets, and other device categories where a strongly supported application framework and active application ecosystem are important elements of platform choice. 

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Simics for Networked Systems: An Interview with RTI

By Jakob Engblom

Networked systems is one of the primary application areas for Simics. Simics can run many machines inside a single Simics simulation, and apply all Simics features to the system, not just to a single machine inside the system. This is something that Dan Poirot from Real-Time Innovations, RTI, has made quite extensive use of recently. It is a pretty cool use-case for Simics, so we arranged to interview Dan about his use of Simics.

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Catching up at IDF 2011 - An Embedded Chat with Intel ECG

By Eddie Glenn

In case you missed it, the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) was held last week in San Francisco.  The Simics team was busy at IDF with multiple Simics-related events being held.   At IDF, we handed out free memory sticks preinstalled with Simics, models of Intel devices, and a hands-on tutorial.  This is a great way to quickly learn about Simics first hand.  We had a few left over, so if you want one, email us ([email protected]) and we’ll send one over, while supplies last.

At IDF I had the pleasure to sit down with Tian Tian, a Senior Technical Account Platform Architecture Engineer at Intel.  He’s part of the Data Center and Connected Systems Group focusing for the embedded market segment. Working with customers on almost a daily basis has given Tian some great insight into what their current issues and challenges are.

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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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Surfing the Web with Netscape 4

By Jakob Engblom

While looking into our old SPARC server targets for our new SPARC legacy offering, I  opened up a Simics demo checkpoint that we have had around for a long time (at least eight years). This demo is an UltraSPARC II running Solaris 9, and it shows how web browsers looked around 2001.  I used real-network to connect the machine to the Internet, and tried the default webbrowser - Netscape 4.78, built in June of 2001.

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Platform Wars

By Dan Noal

In recent weeks, we’ve seen two seismic shifts in the mobile and tablet markets. First, Google announced its intent to acquire Motorola Mobility and a few days later, HP announced that it would discontinue producing webOS-based phones and the TouchPad. 

Google’s move to buy a hardware manufacturer has long been speculated in the media.  Motorola Mobility had previously been reported as a possible target, so Google’s move isn’t entirely surprising. However, after nearly 3 years since the public launch of Android, the question is why now?  Consider the comments of Android industry partners (e.g. Samsung, HTC, Verizon) mentioning the need to protect the Android ecosystem from IP lawsuits that threaten Android’s growth.  Now add the fact that Motorola Mobility has grown a significant patent portfolio in the mobile space over the past decade. 

Still, it is interesting to wonder about the long-term vision. 

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The Embedded Security Paradox

By Bill Graham

For embedded systems developers, there exists a paradox in that security for the device is a high priority or "must-have" capability but it’s at odds with market and business requirements for their device as this often lengthens development time. Not only that, the nature of embedded systems is changing to a highly networked interconnected environment that increases the demand for security while further complicating it. Let's look at this in a bit more depth:

Delicate Balance

Embedded developers are more aware of security requirements for their devices. However, they need to balance the design and implementation of security in the device with its functionality, performance, and intended market. Furthermore, securing a device must not cause its delivery to be well beyond the forecast schedule or cost. Although security is an important feature for a device, it is not necessarily a differentiating feature, yet expected capability. Customers expect security but won't pay more for it nor choose your product over another because of it (in the long term). A delicate balance is required to make sure a device is as secure as it can be given these competing factors.

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How to Get Virtual

By Jakob Engblom

My blog posts about Simics tend to focus on how virtual platforms are used and what you can do with them. However, underlying all Simics use is the issue of getting a virtual platform in place. You need some kind of platform to run your software on in order to get the full benefit of Simics. Thus, creating virtual platforms is an important part of practical Simics use for many of our users.

We have been working with Simics for more than a decade, and we have learnt a lot about modeling along the way. The approach we have ended up with is a top-down methodology, where we start by investigating the target system as a whole from the perspective of the intended use cases, and then explore the details of each subsystem in order to determine how best to model it.  We then switch to bottom-up, applying an iterative modeling flow that delivers something useful as quickly as possible. During development, the goal is to always keep a useful (albeit probably incomplete) platform available at all times.

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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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Software at the Toddler Stage

By Jakob Engblom

Developing software is an adventure where you explore the unknown, one line of code at a time.  At some point, the program reaches the stage where you can actually run it and try it - and that's where the real fun begins.  The software will sometimes behave as expected, but more often than not it will not. It will do something else, or crash, or generally do the wrong thing.  It is very much like a toddler - you can rely on it to some extent, but you never know when it will decide to do something unexpected, funny, or just throw a fit over something that would have seemed inconsequential.

I have spent quite a bit of time recently with toddler stage of Simics 4.6 (prereleases and betas).  The end result is really good and qualifies as an adult specimen (as discussed previously on this blog), but there was a lot of entertaining (and frustrating) things that went by as Simics 4.6 was a toddler. All software developers have stories like these to tell, but I just wanted to share a few of the funnier ones and give a glimpse of just how much work it is to get something like Simics running.

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They Just Upgraded our Coffee Machine

By Jakob Engblom

They just upgraded our coffee machine in the office. When I came out into the kitchen to get another cup, a service technician was there with a laptop perched on the sink and a USB cable running into the innards of the coffee machine, into the back of its open front panel. When I asked what was going on, he said that he was updating the coffee machine. In particular, he was adding the feature of selecting the strength of the coffee being brewed.

A software update to add features to a coffee machine? It is a bit weird, but also a perfect illustration of how pervasive embedded software has become in all manners of systems.

It is not easy to explain to non-technical people just what an embedded system is and what software does when it is not running as an application on a PC (or smartphone or tablet or other familiar computing device). Our coffee machine upgrade does offer a nice illustration of what is going on, and how software and hardware combine to form cyberphysical systems.

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Wind River Named "Transformational"

By Ido Sarig

Voke, Inc. has just released its annual “Market Mover Array Report on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)," and we’re very pleased to see that Wind River’s Device Lifecycle Management solutions were favorably reviewed, and ranked as  “Transformational” - the highest category, reserved for vendors that are changing the tone and direction of the market! 

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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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Twenty, Thirty, and Sixty Years Ago

By Jakob Engblom

In 2011, we mark several anniversaries here at Wind River and in the world of virtual platforms.  First of all, it is 30 years since Wind River was founded, in 1981.  Ten years later, in 1991, the first code of what would become Simics was written by Peter S Magnusson at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.  Thus, Simics turns 20!  2011 also marks the 60th anniversary of the instruction-set simulator and virtual platform-based debug.

In 1951, Stanley Gill from the Mathematical Laboratory at the University of Cambridge published a paper called "The Diagnosis of Programmes on the EDSAC" in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London.  In it, he describes how he created a single-stepping debugger for the EDSAC computer.  As an aside, the EDSAC was the first programmable general-purpose computer in the world, and the team around it built early versions of many of today's standard software tools such as the first bootloader and the first symbolic assembler, which was very visionary and an amazing feat of programming.

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The Best Software On Any Planet

By Mike Deliman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy anniversary Wind River!

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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Collaboration, Collaboration, Collaboration!

By Michel Genard

We have all seen reports, studies or have first hand experiences about projects falling apart. One of my favorite illustrations about this phenomenon is the well-known “tree swing picture.” Interesting to note that it dates from the 1970’s… I guess there are things that never change!

Seriously, humor often comes from a seed of truth. In the case of this comic strip, the core issue is communication and mutual understanding between teams.  Speaking the same language is not a guarantee that teams are intelligently working together. Even when using  plain and simple English (although, the existence of “simple” English is debatable), we frequently witness a lack of understanding between hardware and software teams. Why? 

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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. 

 

Fun with VxWorks MILS 2.1

By Paul Parkinson

It's been awhile since my previous blog, as I have been rather preoccupied with responding to a number of RFPs. However, I’ve managed to find some time to work on some demos for VxWorks MILS 2.1, which has been fun.

VxWorks MILS 2.1 introduced support for Wind River Linux as a Guest OS (VxWorks Guest OS and High Assurance Environment (HAE) having been supported in the earlier VxWorks MILS 2.0 release). I wanted to get some more hands-on experience of using Wind River Linux as a Guest OS (GOS) running on the VxWorks MILS 2.1 Separation Kernel (SK). So, I started with a version of theBlaster Blastee demo which had been modified by one of my colleagues in Engineering to use a Linux GOS partition for the Blaster. (Blaster Blastee is a well-known Wind River demo which provides a nice flexible framework for blasting TCP or UDP packets between nodes, testing network connectivity and performance).

 I thought it would be an interesting exercise to extend the demo to also use Linux in a second partition as the Blastee (receiver), to demonstrate the scalability and determinism of the MILS SK with multiple Linux virtual boards (VB).

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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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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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Making the Case for MeeGo 2.0

By Chris Buerger

As an owner of the original Maemo-based N770, today is a sad day. Earlier, Nokia announced it would make Windows Phone 7 Nokia’s primary mobile platform, not MeeGo. This puts the brakes on what many considered a bold corporate initiative to bring Linux to a new class of Nokia mobile devices. Well before the iPad, well before the undoubtedly innovative yet largely undifferentiated avalanche of Android based devices, there was a dream, a vision to create unique Linux software for a new class of Nokia devices.

There are plenty of opinions that this announcement marks the end of MeeGo. Personally, I do not subscribe to that view. MeeGo, and the open source projects that are part of it, has a place in open source mobile Linux, and in many cases will continue to evolve and thrive. 

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Being Helpful or Simply Correct?

By Jakob Engblom

The other day, I spent some time getting a new operating system up on one of our Simics virtual platforms. The platform is stable, the hardware is shipping and it is being used with the very software I was setting up. However, as the operating system was booting, I got quite a lot of warnings from Simics about incorrect hardware settings. The operating system still worked, however, so why did we see all these warnings? Actually, when is it prudent to issue warnings to a user about suspicious uses of hardware? When building Simics models, we want them to be helpful and offer warnings as much as possible - especially for cases where some uses might be considered technically "correct" but are actually somewhat suspicious.

A virtual platform like Simics can print warnings to the simulation console when software performs operations that are not legal according to the hardware specification. Typical examples are writing to offsets in device register banks where there are no registers, changing the value of bits which are marked as "reserved", or writing illegal values to configuration registers.

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