Mike Deliman

Virtually Yours...

This morning we've made a couple of announcements that will hopefully surprise and delight the Real Time computing community.  Wind River is releasing two new products that have their base in  virtualization: Wind River's Hypervisor, and Wind River's MILS 2.0.  Both of these products introduce platform virtualization, used in different ways.   Wind River's implementations allow for a "floatilla" of OS's" to be run amongst a "sea of Cores" - it can be run as a one-to-many, many-to-many, or many-to one configuration (that is with SMP, one OS can be run by many cores, the Hypervisor is capable of running / scheduling many OS's among many cores, and both the Hypervisor and MILS 2.0 are capable of running many OS's over one shared core).

Both of these products are very high-powered and sophisticated.  Both products are designed with an eye to the future.  The Hypervisor itself can be used in SMP, AMP, Supervised-AMP and cooperative multicore configurations, and can also be configured to paravirtualize several Operating Systems and run them all (time-share style) on a single core.  The MILS 2.0 product is designed specifically to paravirtualize OS's and run them on a single shared-core with a high degree of separation maintained by the MILS 2.0 separation kernel.

Many of our customers have built multiprocessor systems, sometimes because there wasn't enough horsepower on one board to handle the needs of their system, sometimes because of a need to keep data processing nodes separate (security).  With today's processors, you may be able to replace a multi-board system with either a single multicore board running Hypervisor or a single board running a modern (single) core with our MILS 2.0 separation kernel.  Both products allow a number of instances of VxWorks to run on paravirtualized platforms, or run without an OS at all (bare-metal or minimal executive, etc), and the Hypervisor also supports Wind River's Linux on paravirtualized platforms.

So what is virtualization?  I think of virtualization as a star-trek like copy machine, where you start off with a computer, and make "virtual" copies of it.  The copy can have anything that's already on the real machine, or a subset of those features.  The Hypervisor schedules those copies to run on the real machine, making them believe they are completely in control.  This can allow you to replace several older machines with one virtualized machine and get the same work done.

Some popular examples include VMware, Parallels, and QEMU.  These are all available for desktop machines, allowing users to create polymorphic environments.  These are mostly "type-2" hypervisors, meaning the hypervisor is a guest running under a main operating system and is subject to the whims of that OS.  Wind River's implmentations are "Type 1", meaning our Hypervusor runs as the only supervisory access code on the system and has absolute control over the system.

I'm pretty excited about this.  It brings supercomputing into the embedded realm!

Does it have a motor?

Back in the 80s there was a car commercial, where a small crowd of doubters are looking over a neighbor's new car.  Amongst the comments and questions about the options that make a car comfortable comes the quip "Does it have a motor?"

It's true that a car can be a car without a motor, or any of the comfort options, but let's face it - with no motor, it's not worth much.  Same thing for a car in snow country without a heater, or a car in the Mojave without working A/C.  Some of the "comfort options" become necessities depending on the intended use.

The same thing can be said for Operating Systems.  In this blog entry on Applications for Linux, DMarti brings up a very big issue facing Linux today:  What exactly is in your pot of soup?  The big applications producers are starting to take notice of what it means to support Linux.

Linux is a lot like soup - how it turns out is a combination of the ingredients and how you cook them.  It seems like most providers are grabbing whatever freezes they "need", applying a specific set of patches, and some proprietary patches or enhancements, rolling up a release, and dropping it out on FTP with one or two "demo" platforms.  They may offer some open-source applications they've ported to their release, or some of their own packages.  But as DMarti points out - the bigger players are going to want a standardized platform to base their support on, not just the results of some "compliance" tests, and not just one released platform.  And that means a known starting point, free of proprietary changes that may inhibit future growth or portability.

Although software manufacturers like Adobe may want to start off with a big name like Red Hat as a platform, they would be wise to take a conservative approach.  In order to run on a wider audience than just the "preferred platform", the implementation itself should be based on a locked and well-known "version" of Linux, without dependencies on any proprietary extensions.  I think as time goes on, this will be a strategy more and more software manufacturers follow.

Wind River Systems has our "own" release of Linux.  But ours is a little different than others.  We've taken a bit of an idealistic approach to our release.  We start with a known kernel from kernel.org, and a known set of patches and libraries - these are all publicly available.  We apply the patches in a step-by-step method, and provide instructions on exactly what we did.  We provide BSPs to support Linux on specific hardware.  We don't have proprietary extensions built-in to the base offering, we don't have patches or extensions that may or may not ever make it into any other Linux release, we don't have software included that would "gate" a user's ability to comply with a standard or upgrade to future patches from kernel.org (etc).

Any big player would understand how dangerous it is to tie one's product or future to a proprietary standard or system.  History is full of lessons where superior technologies lost out to open standards because the open standards made for increased usability and lower price-points (Betamax, anyone?).   I think there will be a chosen Linux platform upon which the likes of Adobe standardize, but I also think the lessons of the past will guide a choice that can be accessed by anyone, not just a single proprietary release.