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
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?
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.
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.
By Bill Graham
Security Vulnerabilities are Expensive
Shipping security vulnerabilities in a finished product and having them discovered or worse, exploited, is a very expensive proposition for embedded device vendors. As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, security defects are much more expensive to patch and fix the later they are discovered. If you’re lucky to catch a vulnerability during development, you can likely save your company and project thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, security vulnerabilities are expensive and costly not only in dollars but in reputation and customer satisfaction.
On average, a vendor loses around 0.6 percent value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. This is equivalent to a loss in market capitalization values of $0.86 billion per vulnerability announcement. --Telang & Wattal 2007
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.
By Brian Vezza
Today is an exciting day for companies looking to implement M2M-based devices and services, as well as for Wind River. We have announced a collaboration with Digi International to deliver a new family of Digi-branded machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions that will enable us to significantly expand our M2M footprint. Digi M2M Solution Builder kit will be based on Wind River software, Intel architecture and the iDigi Device Cloud. Digi is a recognized leader in the M2M space and we are extremely pleased to be working with them.
I’ve written in past blog posts about “do-it-yourself” (DIY) M2M, the complexity involved, and hinted about a “better way.” Today’s announcement is a big step in that direction. Together, Digi, Wind River, and Intel are making it much easier for companies to cost effectively develop and deploy M2M-based (or “intelligent connected embedded”) solutions.
By Bill Graham
In my previous post I discussed the potential benefits in quality and costs that static analysis brings to software development. In addition to common coding errors, many of the bugs found by static analysis are potential security defects as well. Buffer overflow, OS command injection, unrestricted string format and integer overflows are among the top 25 most dangerous security coding defects (according to the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWS) from the MITRE organization). These types of defects are common in C and C++ and are dangerous to correct operation in general but also pose significant security threats – often because the right exploit can lead to arbitrary code execution on the target. Once an attacker can execute code on your device, they can gain complete control, which might include reflashing the firmware, installing malware or rewriting the command and control software.
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.
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.
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).
By Emeka Nwafor
I have been totally absorbed by the media coverage of the incredible rescue of the thirty-three Chilean miners that were trapped about a kilometer below the earth's surface for months. The images of jubilation as "Super Mario" and the other miners exited the pod will be imprinted in our minds forever. A real Feel Good Story.
Many thanks to the scientists, engineers, and rescue specialists from across the planet for playing their part in bringing up the 33 miners and 4 rescue workers and for making this A Beautiful Day.
Between reports of the rescue of the individual Chilean miners, CNN's report on the "Best Jobs in America" caught my attention, my curiousity, and briefly diverted my focus from the rescue (and my day job). Of the top-100 jobs, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Software Architect" ranked at the top - #1 in America. "Product Management Director" and "Software Engineering/Development Director" were in the top-20 - this was a pleasant but credible surprise. "Telecommunications Network Engineer", "Test Software Development Engineer", "R&D Manager", and "Systems Engineer" were all in the top-50. Very interesting considering that these rankings are based on criteria like compensation, job growth, and quality of life.
By Brian Finkel
I reflect on a recent visit with my 84-year old Aunt Honey. As you might expect, she is not an avid cell phone user. She wanted help entering contacts into her phone. She has a basic phone so we had to enter text using the “9-up” keypad. Her objective is to make phone calls by selecting someone’s name instead of typing the telephone number.
The event had me thinking about the way we used to make telephone calls – using an address book or a phone list and then typing in the number. In my youth, things weren’t so bad – everyone lived in the same town – with the same area code and only a few prefixes. For each friend you only had to remember the 4 digits and perhaps which prefix to use. Fast forward a few years and with the advent of cell phones, IP telephony, new area codes, and geographically-dispersed friends and family – you now need to remember 10 digits. 10 digits is beyond most people’s working memory (which is typically 7 digits). Address books and phone lists were required.
By Amit Nandi
I recently started reading a book called “I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works” by Nick Bilton. I got interested in the book after reading an excerpt online at the New York Times, where Bilton is the lead writer for their technology blog. This is where my life started imitating art.
While I was waiting for the e-book to download, I read on to the second half of the excerpt. Bilton describes a nifty rule he calls “1, 2, 10”; numbers that describe the distance between your eyes, the screen of a mobile device, computer screen and television screen, respectively. He asserts that content will eventually follow us from screen to screen and place to place. While this exact future hasn’t happened yet, a reasonable facsimile of it was taking place in a race between the downloading of his book both on my computer and my iPod touch. Having the content accessible on a large monitor during the day and at bedtime is really handy when you’re writing to a deadline.
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).
By Paul Henderson
As I've mentioned before, we've been working with IBM Rational for some time around quality management automation. Both companies see the skyrocketing software content and architectural complexity in the embedded device market as creating a tipping point where companies will not be able to continue with business as usual.
Product development teams will need to take a more managed and automated approach to quality that spans across the lifecycle and access into the devices under test. This is particularly true in markets that require strict adherance to standards and compliance regulations.
We put together a joint whitepaper on this subject downloadable from here. And we are also having a joint web seminar next week on Tuesday Aug 31 at 2pm EDT. You can register for this event here.
By Mark Hermeling
Two good blog posts from some of my colleagues at Freescale. One on Heading Into Hyperspace: Hypervisor and Multi-core design by Jim Trudeau and one by Rob Oshana on the Top 3 Keys to Multi-core software development. Jim talks about the multi-core aspects mostly from Freescale's P4080 perspective, an elegant, powerful and very popular processor in the networking space. The P4080 has not only many processors, it is truly designed for multicore with multiple peripherals (multiple PCI hosts) and multiple memory controllers for example to reduce contention.
By Bill Graham
In part two of my interview with Professor Glauco Caurin, we talk about some the research projects that they working on and how they are using VxWorks and other Wind River products:
Q: Tell us about the research projects you have make use of Wind River Products. Can you give us more detail on the Kanguera, the five fingers robot hand? Which of our software are you using? Where is it used and why?
We are using VxWorks now for some years with different platforms. More then 8 years ago we started the first research projects with the hardware funded by FAPESP using VxWorks donated by Wind River as the RTOS. The projects were related to the development of robot grippers and hands.
By Paul Henderson
Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting). If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at [email protected]and I will send it to you.
In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.
By Paul Henderson
I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.
The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest. So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails.
By Emeka Nwafor
Today I managed to carve out some quality hands-on time to play with Wind River Workbench integrated with Rational Team Concert - also known as Jazz. While playing with this development environment, I found myself wishing that "I had these types of development tools back when I was doing embedded development environment".
By Paul Henderson
Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.
Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.
By Jakob Engblom
As you might have seen, Wind River recently acquired Simics, a product
formerly sold by Virtutech. My colleagues Michel Genard and Bill Graham recently blogged on the topic.
Simics can have a huge impact on the product development processes, time-to-market and quality. Apart from the cool things that Simics does to improve the development process, it is also a very interesting technology in and by itself.
By Mark Hermeling
Customers often ask me in my opinion as to what their path to
multi-core should be. Invariably I ask them two things. 1) Describe your
current hardware architecture, your next hardware architecture and what
your hardware architecture will look like in 3 years; 2) Describe your
current software architecture and any plans you have to evolve it.
This leads to interesting discussions, most customers can draw their hardware architectures, some can white board their software architectures easily, some have more problems, but I have a strong feeling that their drawing differs significantly from the actual implementation.
By Mark Hermeling
Looking forward to my trip to ESC Sillicon Valley next week. It is promising to be a busy show, especially since ESC is now combined with the Multicore expo. I just leafed through the agenda (in the form of a Nxtbook) and found a large number of sessions that I want to attend, experience show though that I'll probably be too busy talking to customer to attend sessions, which is a good problem to have of course.
I am hosting a 4 hour session (with several of my colleagues) on Multicore Demystified on Tuesday afternoon 2.30-7pm (there will be refresments!) in the Hilton Plaza Room. Do stop by either the session, or our booth at Multicore Expo for a chat if you want to brain storm about your next generation devices.
By Bill Graham
In my previous post, I mentioned the update to our VxWork 653 platform but didn't go into too many details. I'll share a few more things in this post. Our VxWorks 653 Platform has been doing really well and we're quite proud of its success. In particular, our recent announcements about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and NASA Ares X-1 programs really put a spotlight on the product. As I mentioned in my last post, it's doing well because it enables aerospace and defense companies the chance to integrate a lot of systems onto one processor.
ARINC 653 is a time partitioning scheduling specification that allows designers to create safety critical systems that share the same processor yet guarantees time and space separation for each partition. My colleague Paul Parkinson goes into some detail in this post.
By Emeka Nwafor
By Bill Graham
We just announced
a new release of our state of the art tools which
includes an update to Workbench and Workbench OCD version 3.2, plus our
Wind River Compiler suite (also known as the Diab compiler). This news
reminded me of my days as a product manager for tools software and the
need to talk about the importance of tools to project success.
By Emeka Nwafor
"What exactly are you testing? How are you testing it?"
I'm sure that these are amongst the questions that product, business, and technical managers across the embedded software industry have asked themselves on several occasions throughout their careers. I know I have.
The importance of testing embedded software isn't new. In my "youth", I remember our VP of Product Development circulating a white paper that discussed the devastating impact resulting from the deployment of an untested "simple" patch to some switching software and declaring that "this cannot happen to us".
By Mark Hermeling
A good article from colleague Jens Wiegand on multicore in medical devices.
Jens talks about consolidation and innovation, two driving factors in
both medical and industrial devices. However, he also points out the
flip side of the coin: certification. Virtualization can help provide
strong separation on multicore, which makes certification manageable
(the article goes into more depth).
Jens also touches on tooling for multicore development, an often-overlooked and under appreciated aspect. A single development environment that can be used to develop the entire device (real-time, UI, kernels, userland) as well as drive testing and debugging is a must to create highly efficient development teams.
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