Wind River Blog Network

Wind River Expertise Recognized with GENIVI Award

By Franz Walkembach

The Automotive group at Wind River is quite an impressive team…Consider this: hundreds of engineers and decades of successfully completed projects have helped Wind River carefully foster the development in this industry. We not only created trusted connections with customers and partners, but we’ve also stayed ahead of key trends, riding a wave of open source innovation right as it started to build momentum. Fast forward to today…our ongoing efforts to advance the automotive industry has reached another great achievement – Wind River has received the Most Valuable Contributor Award from the GENIVI Alliance.

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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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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 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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