Wind River Blog Network

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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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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Industrial Automation and the Cloud

By Alexander Damisch

We’re hearing so much about the cloud lately – and I get asked often what cloud computing means in the context of industrial automation and about the benefits delivered, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to share my thoughts on the cloud as it pertains to industrial automation.  It's a topic I recently covered in a Q&A session for the Intel Embedded Community.

As embedded devices are increasingly connected to the enterprise, arguably the most cost-effective way to implement these systems is via cloud architecture. Within industrial automation, clear targets for a cloud architecture are typical IT components like manufacturing execution systems (MES) and production planning systems (PPS).  There is no need for discrete servers in industrial automation environments that perform functions for only a few machines or manufacturing processes, when they can be performed as cloud services, and thus operated more efficiently.

In industrial automation, the shift to cloud computing is causing a disruption in the embedded space by changing key paradigms regarding data and the location of intelligence.  Specifically, the cloud is affecting the architecture of IT structures (moving from a fixed client server architecture, to a distributed architecture with local and global intelligence), and it is also impacting machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in the embedded cloud. 

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How Are You Reducing Radiation?

By Pete MacKay

A few years back the FDA launched an initiative aimed at reducing radiation exposure in patients undergoing CT scans.  Clearly there are concerns with exposing the human body to ionizing radiation, and due to the prevalence and popularity of these imaging techniques the FDA feels they are in a position to ensure proactive steps are taken to minimize exposure.  They cite studies done in 2009 showing this total exposure to have nearly doubled in two decades in the US population.

Several factors come into play with cause and effect here, and the FDA is exploring several different perspectives.  Preventative measures start with educating patients, clinicians, and technicians, and altering approaches to therapy planning and the decision process around imaging studies.  The emergence of highly connected health enterprises (and society in general) enables a proposal to track cumulative dosage using tools like a national dosage registry and a patient medical imaging record – who knows, maybe just like Fido runs around with a chip in his neck we might all someday be implanted with a dosimeter along with our medical record?  Kidding aside, the obvious place to start with dosage reduction is with the device manufacturers themselves.

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Improving Embedded Operating System Security Part 4: Partition Systems to Protect Essential Components

By Bill Graham

An effective security technique is to separate different major components of a system into partitions. In some cases these partitions are physical, i.e., separate devices with physical separation. With modern virtualization technologies these partitions can be virtual, in software, on the same device or processor. An example of this would be combining a general purpose OS (GPOS) such as Microsoft Windows or Linux and an RTOS such as VxWorks on the same device but each runs in its own virtual environment. In this way security attacks and vulnerabilities on the GPOS do not affect the mission critical control done in the RTOS. Similarly, the GUI and remote access for a device can be in one partition and the control systems in another.  Remote attacks that deny service or crash the GUI partition do not affect the control systems.

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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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Secure Mobility Message Resonates at MILCOM 2011

By Chip Downing

MILCOM 2011 last week in Baltimore, MD was not only educational, but it was a watershed event.   Last year, it was a “coming out” party for custom Android devices; this year however, was the year where many companies are now using COTS hardware and software to their fullest extent, along the entire supply chain, from core to edge and user devices.   I believe this COTS adoption is driven by two powerful forces – the exploding capabilities of commercial tablet devices, and global military budget pressures.

The vastly increasing power and capability of commercially available mobile communications devices is simply amazing. Just a few years ago, almost everything in this military communications space was purpose built, and most commercial products were simply inadequate to address the rugged and complex system demands of military communications systems.   As seen at MILCOM 2011, this has officially changed -- COTS end-to-end communications domains rule.

So if all of these MILCOM vendors are not making customized hardware and software, what are they doing?   Wind River had over 500 people visit its booth at MILCOM this year, and most of the discussions I had with both suppliers and end users at the show were about increasing device security and leveraging high volume COTS components in demanding deployment scenarios.

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Improving Embedded Security: Proper Runtime Selection

By Bill Graham

Selection of secure components for an embedded system is key to a secure system. Leveraging a secure RTOS, middleware, virtualization and tools significantly reduces the effort and development costs. Moreover, there are additional benefits from using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software components over Roll Your Own (RYO) code or self-ported and maintained open source code. Some of the COTS components worth considering include:

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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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Embedded Virtualization to Underpin Next Generation Network-Centric Operations

By Chip Downing

“Embedded virtualization” is a technology that is rapidly proliferating in global defense systems that deliver critical data to warfighters.  Embedded virtualization is typically instantiated in small layer of software called a hypervisor that controls all activities and functions on a microprocessor deployed in a military control and communications equipment.

These hypervisors can be foundations for hosting a wide range of complex, dynamic applications for network-centric operations (NCO), electronic warfare (EW) and spectrum planning/electronic warfare battle management (EWBM) systems. Hypervisors enable the migration of existing capabilities from legacy NCO programs onto next generation platforms, enabling wider integration and preserving program investment.  

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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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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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Unsuspecting Benefit of Virtualization

By Chris Ault

I came across an article the other day that was discussing forthcoming innovations in the automation industry. The article discusses how Ethernet is becoming ubiquitous for manufacturing, closing the numerous and incompatible communications protocols and media enabling communication among the various control and controlled systems. The article then goes on to draw industrial automation into the cloud for things such as inventory control and tighter relations between producers and consumers.

One aspect of embedded virtualization that we are focusing on is providing the ability to host general purpose operating systems, such as Linux or Windows, alongside real-time operating systems such as VxWorks on the same embedded device or equipment. In the manufacturing industry, using a hypervisor to run both VxWorks and Windows on the same robotic device allows the device to retain the real-time control while also interacting with standards-based management protocols such as SNMP, CIM or WBEM over Ethernet.

A device like an automotive robot or printing press can keep its real-time OS and application intact while using a general-purpose OS for interacting with other management and control systems via Ethernet. Rather than modify the real-time control application to extend management functions, equipment manufacturers can extend the functionality of these devices by adding general purposes OSes that interact with non-real-time systems. The non-real-time components of the devices can interact with the corporate IT systems to report on health, status, progress, and inventory issues while also communicating with the real-time component of the devices via Ethernet.

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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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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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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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Physical or Virtual

By Jakob Engblom

When you explain what a virtual platform or full-system simulation solution like Wind River Simics is, a key part is that it runs the same software as a physical board or physical system. This does capture the core of the idea - but it does not mean that the virtual platform is only "just like the real thing".

Comparing virtual and physical systems is like comparing apples and apples, not apples and oranges: while apples are mostly interchangeable, they is certainly variation between them. Some apples are best for eating, some are better for making sauce, some are pie material, and some are best for fermenting cider. The type you select depends on what you want to cook. The difference between physical and virtual hardware is similar: they can be used as replacements for each other to some extent, but the connoisseur can make much better use of both by looking at the differences.

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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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VxWorks MILS 2.1 Platform hands-on

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I visited Wind River headquarters in Alameda, California, to learn about VxWorks MILS Platform 2.1 and to get hands-on experience with the release.

I had been looking forward to the trip, as the 2.1 release adds some significant new capabilities: Wind River Linux as a guest operating system and the new High Assurance Network Stack (see Bill Graham's recent blog for a more detailed overview).

So, the VxWorks MILS separation kernel (SK) can now host Wind River Linux, VxWorks and a High Assurance Environment as guest operating systems in a virtualised environment (as shown below).

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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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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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Interview with Girish Venkatasubramanian

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.

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Type 1 versus Type 2 Hypervisors

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.

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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 3

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?

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Freescale on Multi-core and Virtualization

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.

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Primary Virtualization Use Case

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.

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