VxWorks 6.8: Broadening our horizons

Today marks the announcement of our latest VxWorks release, version 6.8. It's difficult to summarize a major release for VxWorks because there are so many parts to a modern RTOS - it's not just a kernel anymore. Therefore, I'm going to do a series of posts that hopefully cover some of the highlights of the release. For customers interested in all the details, our online support site has that covered.

If I was going to highlight one thing for this release, it would be the significant increase in processor support for new multicore chips. The post title was chosen for this reason, we are broadening the horizons of our multicore solution with each release to keep pace with the hottest new embedded platforms. VxWorks 6.8 adds support for ARM 11 MPCore and Cortex A9, Cavium Octeon CN3xxx and CN5xxx, RMI XLR and XLS, Freescale QorIQ P2020 and Intel Core i7. This list is really a who's who of multicore processors and for a significant set of major processor architectures - ARM, Intel Architecture, Power PC, and MIPS.

Multicore is a significant factor in embedded systems and we are striving to keep VxWorks the product of choice for customers seeking a multicore RTOS solution. Part of keeping up with the trend is processor support but also improvements to Symmetric Multiprocessing (SMP) and Asymmetric Multiprocessing (AMP) capabilities. In fact, VxWorks is seeing significant success in fielded AMP-based systems which indicates that both types of solutions are needed and important (despite what you may hear from other vendors). Some of the key multicore improvements made in VxWorks 6.8 include:

• SMP core reservation - this means you can dedicate a core to a single process and only that process. VxWorks has already supported core affinity where you can assign a process/thread to a specific core but not the one and only process that runs on that core. The advantage of core reservation is the ability to build AMP-like architectures with an SMP system. For example, you can create a set of dedicated processing engines by reserving one core for each engine, thus ensuring only the processing engines run on each core.
• Major upgrade to Wind River Multi-OS Inter-Process Communication services (MIPC version 2.0). MIPC allows multiple operating systems to talk to each other using a sockets-like interface. MIPC can connect operating systems on the same chip, board, or network. The performance of MIPC 2.0 has been improved and it now includes support for virtual network and serial interfaces.
• Performance improvements for SMP and general (multicore and single core) architecture optimizations for ARM, MIPS and Intel Architecture.
• Spin locks for AMP architectures to provide a common, reliable synchronization mechanism for multiple VxWork instances in an AMP configuration.

Stay tuned for more posts on some of the other interesting highlights for VxWorks 6.8.