Wind River Blog Network

Farewell to Del.icio.us

By Paul Parkinson

I was disappointed to read in TechCrunch this morning that Yahoo has decided to shut down the Del.icio.us social bookmarking website (or should I say service?).

I started using Delicious a few years ago after I had become fed up trying to organise my website bookmarks. I often want to bookmark A&D news stories, blog articles, technical papers and standards, etc., so that I can easily find them again when I want to read through them at a more convenient time or when I need to do research for a Wind River article or presentation.

The problem with web browser-based bookmarks is that this approach doesn't scale well for a large number of bookmarks. Web browser bookmarks can be sorted into hierarchical folders, but this can be counter-intuitive if you have inter-related subjects (e.g. safety and security).

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Sometimes, You Have to Cheat

By Jakob Engblom

In a virtual platform world, cheating is sometimes a good thing. One man's cheat is another man's optimization.

Let's start with a story from the 1904 olympics in St Louis. In the marathon race, a runner crossed the finish line far ahead of the competition at an incredibly good time. It quickly became clear that he had cheated - he had been riding in a car for about half the race. This was obviously wrong, and he was quickly stripped of his "victory." Running a marathon is defined as covering the distance on foot. Using a car is not an allowed option. 

However, if the goal of the marathon race had instead been defined as "get from A to B in the shortest time" with no particular care for the mode of transportation, our cheater would have been hailed as the smart guy. The other runners who insisted on covering the distance on foot would have been considered dumb and behind the times. Thus, we can see that what is considered "cheating" really depends on the rules of the game and what is considered the essential goal of the exercise.

In a the world of virtual platforms, such considerations about the rules of the game are common.

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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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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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Available Now: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

Check this site out! http://developer.windriver.com.

Our initiative to create a resource for our Linux users to connect with others is now a reality! This project focuses on encouraging interactions between Wind River users, Wind River engineers, and embedded Linux community experts.

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Consolidate, Consolidate, Consolidate

By Mark Hermeling

Many telecom applications are actually built up from multiple smaller sub-applications, often running on their own server in a rack, ATCA or otherwise. These servers run on multi-core processors, depending on the age of the last refresh this could be a dual, quad core or more. This is of course nothing new, what's new is how virtualization can improve server utilization.

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Coming Next Week: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

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

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It’s Time for Testers to Step Up

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.

• When staying 'positive' doesn't pay
• Getting negative with white box testing
• Focusing on the 'deltas' with change-based test automation

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Test Driven Development Meets Continuous Integration

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.

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Bill-Of-Material

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.

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Leaders and Followers

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.

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So, What Does _Your_ Software Architecture Look Like?

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.

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ESC Silicon Valley

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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Quit Bugging Me: Making Maps

By Mike Deliman

A tool commonly used in embedded debugging is a linker map - a map of where all the symbols are in the runtime image.  These maps are useful as they turn raw addresses reported by some exception stubs (etc) into offsets into the data or text (program routines) in the computer's RAM.  They give you an idea of what may have been happening when the error occurred.

Producing a linker map is fairly easy.  Most linkers include command line options to produce a map.  This works fine and is very clear when used from a command line.  But things can get a little confusing from within an integrated gui environment.

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Quit Bugging Me: Another Surprise NaN!

By Mike Deliman

An Earlier QBM, "Surprise NAN" covered how floating point computations may become corrupted from unexpected sources.  Today's Quit Bugging Me is about... another Surpise! NAN!

An application runs with several tasks.  One task, which computes a set of floating point values, periodically comes up with bad values, and sometimes the name becomes corrupted.  

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Virtualization and Fault Handling

By Mark Hermeling

In several of my previous posts I have written about the fact that embedded virtualization has low overhead, maintains determinism and all that good stuff. I have also written about some of the benefits of virtualization due to partitioning, scalability and such.

However, there is one aspect of virtualization that gets little 'air time' and that is the fact that there the hypervisor really is a nice, lean, partitioned management layer of your multicore (or single core) hardware.

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A Sea of Cores, Now What?

By Mark Hermeling

A great number of cores gives more processing power, but this power needs to be harnessed. The easiest way to control a sea of cores is of course to run a single operating system over this sea in a Symmetric MultiProcessing mode (SMP). Most modern operating systems support this (which includes Wind River Linux and VxWorks of course).

The trick is to minimize the impact of Amdahl's law. This law describes the maximum theoretically attainable speedup on your multicore processor. Given a N core multicore processor, one would expect an application to run N times as fast, at least ideally.

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Quit Bugging Me: Revalidated

By Mike Deliman

One day, I get this phone call. "We're working with the system, we see the calls that update the exception handlers early on - connecting the clock routines, etc. Then not very much farther on we see the system has run past where tasking should be running but it's not. 

When we check, we're not getting any clock interrupts, and the clock exception handler isn't there any more. How could the system do that? Is there any way the OS could remove it's clock connections?"

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Article: Multi-Core Slow Down

By Mark Hermeling

An interesting article by Dan Woods on Multi-core slowdown. The article tries to temper people's expectations with regards to mArticle: Multi-Core Slow Downulticore. The basic argument goes: A multicore processor has more raw processing power, but it requires the software load that runs on top of that processor to be able to use those cores, if not, the software could run at the same speed as single-core, or even slower.

One of the ways to use all the cores of course is multi-threaded programming in combination with an SMP operating system that can schedule over all the cores (SMP being Symmetric Multi Processing). Typically multi-threaded programs use multiple threads of execution and use synchronization primitives to make sure executions happens in the right order.

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Primary Multicore Software Configurations

By Mark Hermeling

Many people ask the question as to what the best approach would be for them to go to multicore and/or virtualization. This is a great question to start a discussion as there is not a single silver bullet.

I meant to post a quick diagram on the different multicore configurations before, but life has been busy since we announced the Wind River Hypervisor earlier this year. Busy in this case is certainly a good thing.

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Quit Bugging Me: ABI

By Mike Deliman

What's in an ABI?  An Application Binary Interface is a lot like a API - Applications Programming Interface, except instead of just telling you how to make a call, what parameters to provide, and what returns and errnos to expect, an ABI also tells you something about how the interfaces work.  Understanding an ABI for a CPU means you understand how the registers are used, what they're for, and what they mean under different contexts.

Among the things ABIs give you is how your CPU formats memory (the stack) when it makes a call to a routine. An easy way to take a look at an ABI is to set a break point on a routine, and look at what the stack contains.  This is on a PowerPC target.  First I'll spawn a task, then extract the current information about the task - stack pointer, stack base, etc, using target-side debug routines. 

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Quit bugging me: surprise NaN!

By Mike Deliman

You've got a complex system. There are dozens of tasks, a handful of interrupt routines. Your system runs fine, for hours or sometimes days on end. The loading on your system is somewhat "bursty" in that average loading is only about 20% of peak load, and peaks only happen once every hour for less than 5 seconds. Every once in a while, for whatever reason, you suddenly get a divide by zero, not-a-number, or other unanticipated erroneous results on one of your floating point calculations.

In your system you only have a few tasks that employ floating point. You're pretty sure none of your ISRs do, all they do is copy or move data around, they shouldn't have to compute anything. Yet for some reason, occasionally any one of the tasks running floating point will go belly-up with unexplainable results. It just looks like some kind of random corruption.

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Quit Bugging Me: quick shell tricks - using addresses

By Mike Deliman

Here's a quick-trick you can do from the target side shell. It might come in handy. How-to run programs and pass variables by their addresses...

First I'll allocate some space, populate it, assign it to some new symbols and add those symbols to the target-side symbol table using the target resident shell:

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Quit Bugging Me: Induction

By Mike Deliman

Working on a customer problem once, we had an interesting phenomena. Upgrading a system with a large VME cage and several boards, the customer replaced older processor boards with what were then "new" boards. The old boards ran at (I think) 33 MHz, the new ones at more like 133MHz.

The overall system included motor control functions and sensor feedback, there were D-to-A, A-to-D, and other boards in the system. The problem was, with a straight-and-simple rebuild of software for the new boards, the system was giving anomalous readings. Checking the registers for values from the A-to-D boards, there were numbers showing up that were not possible. Readings indicated the motors were on and moving their load when in fact the motors were not connected. Switching back to the old computer boards eliminated the problem. We added some hardware to examine VME bus activity, to see if the new CPUs were reading the bus wrong. We had to put the test board between the CPUs and the sampling boards.

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Serial Intent

By Mike Deliman

Howdy out there,

I realize this is a blog that's supposed to be about real-time programming issues, and mostly I've posted about planetary and space based projects, with a few announcements about technology and news items. Though these combine subjects near and dear to my heart (space, and VxWorks), these were mostly "interest stories", not solid real-time issues. (It must be kind of like tuning into a financial news station and seeing stories about some new exotic fluffy breed of dog.)

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The Software Managers’ Blind Spot....

By Paul Henderson

I’m amazed at the consistency of input I’m getting from device software execs around the world about their lack of visibility into their testing process. Everybody is spending huge amounts of time and money (30-50% of their projects) on testing, but I haven’t found anyone yet that is comfortable with the result. I hear statements like this consistently:

“We have thousands of test cases and we’re afraid to not run them. In fact we are adding more all the time. But we really don’t know what software we are actually testing.”

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E6500 Suspend Problem Solved

By Doug Gaff

I've had a breakthrough on my suspend issues. It seems that the Dell Connection Manager Service was causing the suspend problem. As a reminder, I have the 5530 HSPA AT&T card. When you install Dell Control Point (DCP) and the associated drivers, you get Dell Connection Manager, which is supposed to help manage all of your network devices. Mostly it's redundant with the Network Center in Vista, but you do need it to connect to the Internet over the WWAN card.

As I've complained before, I don't like DCP. It's Dell QuickSet gone horribly wrong. So I've been actively trying to replace it. In my searching for something else to manage the WWAN card, I found an alternative utility called Dell Wireless Manager. It's bundled with the 5530 drivers, but if you poke around on Dell's FTP site, maybe you can find it for the other WWAN cards, too. It's a nice little app for enabling/disabling the card, connecting, looking at bandwidth usage (very important now that AT&T's data plan is 5GB / month), etc. It doesn't work right away when you install it, though, saying that it can't detect a WWAN card.

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Friday Trivia

By Richard Danter

Time is an illusion, UNIX time doubly so...

This is one for all the numerologists out there to ponder.

Next Friday, 13th Feb 2009, at 11:31:30 PM GMT/UTC UNIX time, the number used by UNIX systems such as Linux to calculate the current date and time, will be 1234567890.

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E6500 Part II & Cutting the Cord

By Doug Gaff

Update on my E6500 post. Things are improving in the driver department. Since that post, Dell has released new apps/drivers for: Sound, DCP, Fingerprint Reader, Embassy, and the Webcam. I'm no longer having most of the problems I reported, except suspend is still flaky when the mobile broadband card is enabled, and DCP still really sucks. As soon as I figure out how to run the mobile broadband card without DCP, I'm uninstalling that app. Many thanks for the numerous helpful comments and the commiseration.

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Predictions for 2009

By Doug Schaefer

I'm not usually one to make predictions. It's hard for me to tell the difference between a prediction and wishful thinking. But this article over at the Inquirer (still the best place to get an honest take on the industry along with /.) got me thinking about a couple of things I think are going to be important in 2009. So here we go...

2009: The Year of the GPGPU

This is more a continuation of a trend but the Inq article made some great points that I think will put some spotlight on general purpose programming with GPUs. The key one, is the recent standardization of a cross platform way of programming these things, OpenCL. ATI and nVidia have already signed up to provide OpenCL support for their chips and look for Intel's Larrabee platform to come with the same. I think there is still some software and hardware architectural things that need to be done to make GPGPU more efficient and easier to program. Look for LLVM (which needs an article on it's own) to play a role, as it already is with OpenGL, and look for one of the chip vendors to put a GPU on the memory bus shared with the CPU and make these things sing.

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