Wind River Blog Network

Analyze this…Accelerate that…

By Steve Konish

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

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

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Security Must be Built In…Or Else

By AJ Shipley

Security cannot be bolted on, it must be built in.  This statement proves to be especially true when considering the recent hack of the New York Times, where during a four-month long cyberattack by Chinese hackers, the company's antivirus system from Symantec missed 44 of the 45 pieces of malware installed by attackers on the network.  Cases like this highlight the danger of relying on a single security product to keep you safe from hackers.  According to a written statement by Symantec, "Advanced attacks like the ones the New York Times described underscore how important it is for companies, countries and consumers to make sure they are using the full capability of security solutions. Antivirus software alone is not enough." 

As evidenced with incidents like this, products need to be developed that combine multiple layers of security to keep the “bad guys” out of customer systems, and to also minimize the danger and exposure to device resources and data if they do get in. 

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Healthcare and the 'Internet of Things'

By Santhosh Nair

The healthcare industry is embracing the 'Internet of Things.' From the advent of mHealth, to healthcare personnel bringing their own devices into the hospitals, to consolidations that are happening up and down the value chain, the healthcare industry is finally embracing its version of the Internet. It’s a topic that I discussed recently in a

Q&A session with Intel Embedded Community. With the ability to provide affordable care to the masses topping the lists of political and socioeconomic agendas globally, we need to make a lot more progress on this front.  Here are some on why we're still not where we need to be in terms of the global adoption and institutionalization of these concepts.

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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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Debug Quicker with Simics (video demo)

By Jakob Engblom

Late last year, I presented a one-hour webinar on how Simics lets you “resolve bugs in minutes instead of weeks.” Part of that webinar were two Simics demos that show Simics in action, from the first booting of a target system through loading software onto it and debugging a nasty crash in a server program. The webinar demos are now available as a single Youtube movie, on the Wind River Youtube channel.

The target system used in the demo is a heterogeneous network of four machines. Two ARM-based and two PPC-based. Two of them are running a client application, and two are running a server application. They are all connected on the same virtual Ethernet network, and the client applications can talk to the server applications over the network.

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Wind River PFI achieves GENIVI 3.0 compliance

By Franz Walkembach

It’s new, it’s here, and we have it! The GENIVI Alliance recently released its latest compliance specification GENIVI 3.0, and Wind River Platform for Infotainment was among the first to achieve it. Why should this matter? It’s all about trust, scalability and quality.

GENIVI®, Autosar, Car Connectivity Consortium…these are all groups created in order to set up standards across the auto industry. A long-time expert in this domain, Wind River is a founding member of the GENIVI® Alliance, keeping pace with the latest IVI developments and even helping to drive some of the changes coming from the Alliance. Wind River participates on the GENIVI board, marketing council and several expert groups. Wind River’s engineers have been in charge of leading initiatives such as including Android inside a GENIVI design. They are also currently leading the BIT (base integration team).

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Biggest Predictions for M2M

By Brian Vezza

With the end of the year around the corner, I've been thinking about what's to come on the machine-to-machine (M2M) front.  Overall, I believe we’ll see a tremendous acceleration in the investment and adoption of M2M devices, systems, applications and services.  This will be due to two primary factors: opportunity and necessity. 

The opportunity of M2M gets the most interest with predictions of tens of billions of new connected devices, Big Data, and “smart” systems being widespread across nearly every vertical market.  Estimates of trillions of dollars of shifting investments get everyone’s attention. In some ways though, the necessity driver may be more important than the opportunity driver over the next decade.

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Debugging Simics -- on Simics

By Jakob Engblom

I often write and talk about how useful Simics is for debugging concurrency bugs and glitches in multithreaded and multicore systems. Recently, we had a case where we proved this on a very complex application, namely Simics itself. This nicely demonstrated both the recursive completeness of Simics, and its usefulness for conquering tricky bugs in complex software.

The beginning of this story is a bug in Simics, triggered by a certain Simics configuration. The Simics target is a Power Architecture machine, running some bare-metal test code testing the processor simulation. Occasionally, this setup would crash Simics, due to some bug in Simics or the models. It was a difficult bug to track down, as it only happened in one run out of 50 or so. When attaching a debugger to try to diagnose it, it invariably did not happen (a classic Heisenbug).

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Determinism, Simics, and Flying Piggies

By Jakob Engblom 

In a recent Simics seminar, I was asked about repeatability, variability, determinism and Simics. This is a question that comes up almost every time I present about Simics in front of an audience with testing experience. The people asking the question intuitively think that determinism is a bad thing - since it sounds like it will limit the execution scenarios that will be explored in testing. For a tester, variation is a good thing. However, determinism is not in conflict with variation. And I think I found a perfect illustration of this in a setting that is a bit more accessible and easy to understand than computer simulators. In a computer game, Bad Piggies, from Rovio.  

Bad Piggies is a game based on a physics simulation (not particularly realistic, but still reasonably consistent with everyday experience), where you put together strange contraptions to guide an endearing little pig pilot from the starting point to a goal. What struck me about the game is its incredible sensitivity to inputs, while still being 100% deterministic. To me, this is absolutely analogous to how Simics works (and I guess drawing that analogy indicates a pretty warped mind too).

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The Yocto Project...Striking the balance of speed and stability

By Davide Ricci

On my flight back to the Bay Area, I was reflecting on my memories of Barcelona at the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2012. I’m recalling my time on stage, during the opening panel of the Yocto Project Dev Day, with my friends and colleagues from Texas Instruments, Intel, Jupiter, and ... Mentor. Surprised at the mix of panelists? Well, consider this - the power of the Yocto Project comes from the fact that companies across the entire ecosystem are all sitting together at the same table with one common agenda, one common goal in mind.

This year’s LinuxCon Europe seemed to burst with attendees! Many developers who flew in from all over Europe, North America, and Asia also attended Dev Day (held the day right after LinuxCon). Attendance has grown from previous Dev Days and the sea of excited developers nodding their heads in agreement and solidarity at our Dev Day sessions added to the momentum behind the Yocto Project and its goal to drive real change. 

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Simulation is a competitive advantage!

By Michel Genard

The American general election is over. Pundits providing postmortem analysis will continue to generate a ton of studies. Let’s examine one aspect of the election that has already generated some interesting ink. This article in Time Magazine mentions how analytic teams tried to predict election results, even running as many as 66,000 simulations night after night. The Obama campaign managed to create hundreds of models (likely electors) and run election simulations each day to define and validate the “design” of the path to victory. Each morning, after looking at simulation results they would adjust the campaign. This process is recognized as a competitive advantage. Let’s now map this phenomenon to embedded software development. 

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Poll Results are in...Network Intelligence Heading to Edge and Core

By Steve Konish

If you’re an information junkie like I am, informative charts and polls always catch the eye. Polls are great for capturing an instant snapshot of public opinion on a specific topic. By no means are they scientific. However, they do give us some useful data to gauge whether or not other people share the same opinions we do.

We decided to conduct our own poll related to network intelligence. During a recent Wind River webinar, titled Triple Crown of Network Goes to Software, we took a poll of 200 attendees. If you missed the webinar, not to worry, you can view the archived version. The poll asked the audience where they think network intelligence is initially most needed. The respondents, mostly network equipment providers, gave us these results:

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 3: Mapping the Tools to Activities

By Bill Graham

In the previous posts in this series, Part 1: Automation is the Key and Part 2: Security Improvement and the Software Development Lifecycle, I talked about the connection between the typical embedded device development process and the 5+1 improvement framework for embedded security.  Figure 1 is an illustration of this connection (and discussed in more detail in a previous post). 

 

Figure 1: Mapping the security improvement framework and the device software lifecycle

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Just minutes to a faster, smarter and more secure network

By Stephen Konish

A few minutes…and you’re on the fast path to building the next generation of faster, smarter and more secure network applications. Three minutes – that’s all it typically takes to install key components of the new Wind River Intelligent Network Platform. 

So, let’s take the next few minutes to look at  an evolution taking place for our networking and communications customers and Wind River’s software solutions for this market.  Tens of billions of connected devices continue to generate massive amounts of traffic and security threats are on the rise. In order to better manage the flood of traffic and handle these threats, greater network intelligence and security (without sacrificing high performance) is needed. On top of that, network products need to be scalable to handle future growth. Wind River is rising to meet these challenges and this evolution starts with the newly launched Wind River Intelligent Network Platform.  It is an integrated and optimized embedded software platform consisting of the critical runtime components needed to build high-performance intelligent network products.  So, what does that mean for the customer?

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Medical Device Security

By Jeff Fortin

A recent study published by GAO caused quite a bit of uproar over medical device security. The GAO declared in its report [read more] that the FDA has not put enough oversight in the premarket approval (PMA) of certain medical devices that are susceptible to threats. In the report the GEO referred to an experiment described in the 2008 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The experiment was conducted by a number of experts in security, medicine and engineering. They demonstrated the potential for a hacker to expose patient information as well as interfere with the correct operation of a medical device. The FDA has agreed to the GAOs insights – however pointed out that there have been no real world threats that have been reported to date.  According to the FDA, it did consider unintentional threats for information security, but did not consider information security risks from intentional threats until recently. In summary, the HHS – governing body for the FDA, concurred with the GAO recommendations and have initiated activity in this direction.  Medical device manufacturers must take the threat of security seriously.

Of all medical devices, devices that are implantable, portable or used in a home health scenario represent a growing concern for security and information privacy. I refer to these classes of devices as embedded medical devices. Developers and manufacturers of embedded medical devices are increasingly exposed to security risks as these devices become more complex and also connected to open networks. The good news is that in responding to this threat they need not operate in a vacuum nor do they need to re-invent the wheel. Best practices exist in other industries that can be leveraged by medical device manufactures. Of them the most straightforward is to design your products with security in mind. In other word, design for security. Here are a few things to think about when you design your medical devices.

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Test Management 5.0: Extending testing to Android, security and beyond

By Ido Sarig

Today we announced the latest  version of Wind River Test Management, which takes software test optimization to the next level. 

With this release, we have unified our testing solutions for VxWorks, Linux and Android under one umbrella. All the capabilities of Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST), our solution for Android compatibility testing, have now been merged into Wind River Test Management. This includes all the ready-to-run test assets, more than 26,000 tests in all, which are now available as Wind River Test Management for Android, with support for the latest version of Android  – Jelly Bean – already available!

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Systematically Exposing OS Kernel Races – An Interview with Ben Blum

By Jakob Engblom

Full-system simulators like Simics provide unparalleled insight into what is going on in a target system. Indeed, better insight is one of the main features of simulation that we get regardless of what we simulate and how. In addition, if we want to, we can also exert control over the target system to make it take different execution paths than it otherwise would. Earlier this year, Ben Blum at Carnegie-Mellon University  CMU presented a Master’s thesis that provides a very good example of just what can be achieved by combing the insight and control of a simulator with intelligence and domain knowledge. The system is called Landslide, and it is used to expose race conditions inside of operating-system kernels.

Landslide systematically explores the possible execution paths of the kernel in order to provoke latent bugs that might only happen very rarely in actual use of the operating system – but as we all know, such glitches are the ones that tend to be found by customers in critical situations and force engineering to spend months in reproduction attempts.

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Guest Blog: Qt Commercial 4.8.3 Released with Official Support for VxWorks

By Tuukka Turunen, Digia

This week, together with the Qt Project, Digia released version 4.8.3 of Qt Commercial. Developed together with Wind River, it now includes official support for VxWorks, Wind River's leading real-time operating system found in about one billion devices spanning a wide range of industries -- and can also be found in outer space!

Qt is an excellent tool to create interactive and dynamic user interfaces for VxWorks and the combination of an officially supported platform for commercial Qt licensees is a big step in the evolution of the product. Many of the improvements are also made available to open-source Qt users, though VxWorks itself is not available under an open-source license.

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Analyzing Manycore Scaling with Simics

By Jakob Engblom

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

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

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Simplifying M2M

By Brian Vezza

Today, Wind River is taking a significant step forward in simplifying machine-to-machine (M2M) development for our customers.  We announced the Wind River Intelligent Device Platform which builds upon Wind River’s operating system and tools leadership with M2M middleware to make it easier to design, build, and operate M2M or smart connected devices.

As I’ve written before, M2M devices require a range of capabilities including connectivity, manageability, and security among others.  The complexity and fragmentation in this space makes it much more difficult than it should be for the industry to reach its potential.  Designing products with a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) approach is tough and an M2M software platform makes a lot of sense.  After all, why recreate the wheel connecting, securing, and managing devices from scratch when you can make use of a software platform for these foundational capabilities and focus on your differentiators instead? 

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First Line of Defense

By Ka Kay Achacoso

Designing security into a device requires an understanding of the nature of the attacker.  The cost of security implementation, including  acquiring the technology carrying out the processes, scales up with attacker sophistication.  A rule of thumb is to make the device tampering cost higher than the benefits gained from a security breach.   

Wind River’s VxWorks real-time operating system platforms come with a set of simple security measures that protect the VxWorks applications against some clever hackers.  At the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in San Francisco next week, we will be demonstrating several layers of protection that come with the operating system (booth No. 400).

In this blog post I will outline a few simple security measures, already available in the VxWorks platform, that deter attacks on the VxWorks system. 

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Wind River Linux and the Yocto Project…Sowing the seeds of change

By Davide Ricci

The year was 1998, I was walking through the aisles of a book store on campus at the Politecnico of Milano and a box of software caught my eye. It looked unconventional, sort of "homemade" and on its cover was an image of a man with a red hat.

It was Red Hat 5.2, and the box was big, much bigger than the bunch of DVDs inside would have justified. And heavy. Once I cracked it open, I figured out why – it included a thick manual that contained seemingly endless pages of instructions and mysterious lists of software packages.

It was 1998, and open source was starting to make its first serious steps into a world which, only a handful of years later would change dramatically. A revolution was about to begin.

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 2: Security Improvement and the Software Development Lifecycle

By Bill Graham

In many of my previous posts, I’ve discussed Wind River's 5+1 step improvement framework for embedded device security. By design, it’s meant to complement the software development lifecycle (SDLC) that our customers are using – the stages or phases how they define them and the processes they follow. It’s important for a discussion on tools to put them in the context of the SDLC to see where they apply and how they are useful beyond just the coding stage.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the SDLC and our security improvement framework. The phase names and number of phases may change from customer to customer but the general idea remains the same. It’s important to note that the improvement framework is equally compatible with Microsoft’s Secure Design Lifecycle that is gaining traction amongst embedded developers too.

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MSL: How Big Is It?

By Mike Deliman

I’ve been asked here and there “Just how big is this MSL thing?”

It’s a question I can give several answers to, depending on what the asker means.  In physical terms, you could ride on it.  Here is a good example…in this photo of a worker and MSL, you can see the cruise shell is large enough to house a small couch with more than one person sitting on it.  The rover itself is quite large, I’d imagine good comparisons would be something on the order of a ride-on tractor-mower. 

But that isn’t really the only answer.  In scientific terms, this is huge.  This rover is a well-equipped geological laboratory on wheels.  It carries equipment every high-school and university would be proud to have available.  Laser spectrometer, chemical analyzers, close-up and long-distance cameras, not to mention an advanced autonomous robot running it all.  Any of these tools would be excellent for investigating or teaching/learning about the earth.

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The Yocto Project: What It Is and What It Isn't

By Davide Ricci

As I work heavily with embedded Linux on a daily basis, I’m often asked about the Yocto Project.  While the Yocto Project is gaining traction and folks in the industry are generally aware of it, there still exists a bit of unfamiliarity of the details. What exactly is the Yocto Project? Is it a Linux distribution?  How would I use it in my embedded Linux projects? 

Let’s dig in. The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides sorely needed standardized, high-quality infrastructure, tools and methodologies to help decrease the complexity and increase the portability of embedded Linux implementations. It is not a Linux distribution similar to what Wind River and other Linux distributors provide.  

A lot of vendors across the hardware and software ecosystem participate in the Yocto Project, and together this community is helping embedded Linux developers realize greater cross-platform compatibility and component interoperability.   How the heck does the Yocto Project accomplish that?

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All Your Mars are Belong to US!

By Mike Deliman

It's time to celebrate. We have returned to Mars with the most complex roving robotic laboratory ever sent to another planet. We have demonstrated and proved the Sky Crane concept, which opens doors onto other worlds that we have never had before. We can successfully deliver 1 metric ton to the surface of Mars.

This is an achievement beyond words. A new day is dawning on Mars, a day marked with the ability to achieve incredible scientific goals. A team of over 7000 individuals made this happen. A true testament to humankind. None of these contributors could have done this without the support of their families and significant others.  And I am extremely proud to work for Wind River, a company whose technology helped make all of this possible.

I'm a California boy. It takes someone very special to have this kind of draw, to pull me to Indiana.  Here we are.  It’s late.  This is a historic evening.

All times in Central time (Valparaiso, Indiana):

10:30pm - we tuned in to the press transmissions on both NASA-TV and USTREAM on JPL channel 3. We spent the next several hours toggling between the audio feeds, glued to the monitor.

10:40 pm - DSN ready to relay signals. EDL team is getting setup. EDL "tone screens" were being finalized. Chatter in the flight control room was muted.

10:52 pm - Mars View from MSL is about 20 degrees - she's getting close.

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Complexity

By Mike Deliman

This afternoon I watched the press conferences for Mars Science Laboratory “Curiosity” that were hosted by NASA/JPL from Pasadena, Ca.  These conferences were broadcast over NASA-TV, both on the cable/satellite channels and over the web.  If you haven’t seen the Seven Minutes Video I encourage you to watch it.

Various scientists, directors and managers of the project discussed various aspects of the mission, including discussing how the craft does what it’s designed to.  The biggest message I carry away from today’s two conferences is “Complexity”.  This is by far the most complex robotic probe ever launched to space, perhaps the most complex robotic probe mission ever.

If you watch the video, you will notice that during the landing, the probe plummets through the atmosphere like a well-guided rock.  This is literally what it is doing – falling like a rock that knows how to keep itself upright.  It manages to do this by using guidance rockets, a heat shield with a “just right” shape, and weights that help keep one side tilted slightly towards the ground.  While it’s in this configuration, the guidance rockets make minute adjustments as needed, keeping the probe on course.  This precision guided entry is a large part of how Curiosity is able to make the landing ellipse small.  This whole phase is a series of fantastic engineering achievements.  It is tied in history to the Apollo reentry methods, where we brought astronauts back to Earth, safely.

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Wind River Testing Platforms are "Transformational"!

By Ido Sarig

Last year, market research firm voke, Inc. named Wind River a transformational vendor in its annual "Market Mover Array Report on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)." This year, we are pleased to once again receive this same accolade for Wind River Test Management, our testing platform, in Voke’s 2012 Market Mover Array™ Report for Testing Platforms. It is an honor to once again be ranked in the highest category, reserved for vendors that are changing the tone and direction of the market! 

I don’t want to steal too much of the thunder from the report (you can download and read the report for yourself here), but a few select quotes like “taking the quality of device software to a new level” and “Wind River is changing the conversation in the market about what test professionals of the future will look like” are music to my ears.

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Connected Health: Optimism on the Horizon

By Santhosh Nair

There are telling signs that mHealth is rapidly moving up the adoption curve. 

Earlier this year, Fuld & Company, a pioneer strategy consulting firm, conducted a national war gaming contest where leading business schools stress tested m-Health strategies of companies – ranging from large companies such as GE and Medtronic, to startups like Independa.

A few of the key takeaways from the exercise were:

• Mergers, alliances and licensing agreements are inevitable – the partner ecosystem is very important
• The value is in data integration, not killer applications
• A back office service industry will emerge as a new service model
• User centered design is the key to success

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Seven Minutes

By Mike Deliman

This week, NASA hosted the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) scientists in charge of the Mars Science Laboratory rover, Curiosity, for a pre-landing press conference.  The landing sequences, called “ED&L” – Entry, Descent, and Landing – are the most action packed and critical operations other than the initial launch.  Pete Theisinger has described the EDL sequence as “7 minutes of terror.”

This stage of exploration is similar to that of other landers NASA has sent – Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rovers, and Mars Polar Lander all survived their landings on the red planet after their 7 minutes of EDL terror.  It was these experiences that led Pete to this description.

The NASA/JPL press conference was about an hour long, and packed full of information.  The long and short of it is that we have made giant strides in advancing the technology of placing payloads on the surface of Mars, and the science returned so far has drastically changed our understanding of the red planet, and of planetary evolution in general.

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