Linux

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. Yes, we saw many nodding heads, and many smart questions…such as "What is the greatest milestone of the project so far?" or "What are you guys going to work on next?"

Well, it’s all about striking a balance! One of the greatest achievements (and challenges) so far has been creating a balance between the open source movement, which always strives for innovation, with a pace that drives progress. In this case, the major challenges have revolved around the issue of stability and control, especially since one of open source’s biggest advantage is all about speed.

Ultimately, the industry requires both speed and control.

To date, the Yocto Project has been able to set up an open source development infrastructure and a set of release processes to encourage speed but also allow for better control, helping to promote alignment across ecosystem partners and participants. The results of this effort can be seen in the Yocto Project Compatible requirements.

In order to create alignment, the project has to drive awareness of the Yocto Project Compatible benefits and requirements, addressing questions like: What are these requirements, what does it achieve and why should the industry demand Yocto Project Compatible products, board support packages, middleware, etc.? The Yocto Project ultimately fosters faster and more collaborative development using a common set of tools and practices for greater cross-platform compatibility and component interoperability. More about  benefits can be read here.

Additionally, we have to ask ourselves if these requirements are strong enough to gain the alignment we need to strike that balance between innovation and stability (i.e. speed and control).

While much progress has been made, there's still work to be done. For example, more work is needed around kernel and toolchain alignment. The Yocto Project has three kernels and picks up a new kernel every 6 months to make sure there's always an edge kernel that hardware vendors could choose to enable their latest silicon. The edge kernel represents future innovation. One of the three kernels is the LTSI kernel; such a kernel represents stability. At this stage, the Yocto Project may now need to look at making the transition between the edge and the LTSI kernels smoother. This is the same case for the toolchain alignment. Although the pace of toolchain change is slower, once the project manages to crack the nut for kernel alignment, toolchain alignment will naturally follow.

I'm sure many interesting discussions will continue around this topic. What makes me confident about the Yocto Project’s steady progress is that each and every one of its participating members is looking at solving the challenge of creating a balance of speedy innovation and stability via a common goal and a shared agenda.

To put it simply, the hard work and collaboration across the ecosystem will help achieve the following…"Yocto Project = open source innovation + stability." Let's keep it going!

 

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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.

Take for example, the world of servers - it has evolved significantly. Today, open source software is in most of the servers powering the web. You can commonly find databases working on open source operating systems. In fact, the entire cloud paradigm is being designed and built with open source software - an alternative to it is unthinkable.

However, the world of embedded is much larger.

Today, there are millions of devices being built with open source technology,  yet there is still the feeling that a "homemade" market persists. It is not because there are teams out there enthusiastically wanting to build software from scratch. I still remember the pain of bringing up a basic system with some simple networking functionalities and having to start pretty much from scratch with what was in the box. Then, I had to change everything whenever the next new piece of hardware came in, and then change it again, and again, and again.

There simply hasn't been a unifying power, that thread of commonality, to help the open source community. Over time, there seemed to be a feeling that a major evolution was due.

Fast forward to 2010…open source champions have come together to work through a plan to further empower the community and the seeds of the Yocto Project were planted. By providing a common build system and collaboratively developed technologies, the Yocto Project provides developers with a strong starting point, reducing the time wasted on low value work such as porting, duplicating, recreating, and maintaining. For more information about the benefits of the Yocto Project and Wind River’s commitment to the project, check out my earlier blog post.

After two years, initially crawling and then walking, we’ve seen the early steps transition into a steady march for the Yocto Project. The project has made big strides ,  including recent work by the advisory board to define Yocto Project compliance requirements. 

The Yocto Project has brought about a type of change that drives great things. That type of change which drives innovation and progress.

Wind River has played an instrumental part in the Yocto Project and our efforts on the project for the last two years have been incredibly gratifying. At the start of the project, we knew real change may take some time but the potential rewards to the open source community would be great, So, we dug in and spent years listening to our customers and fellow community members and invested serious time and energy behind the Yocto Project. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of our labor with the introduction of a new Wind River Linux. 

The latest Wind River Linux is now based on the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure. Wind River Linux is also among the very first products to achieve the formal “Yocto Project Compatible” designation. Wind River Linux delivers the latest open source innovations, as well as compatibility and interoperability possible from the Yocto Project, coupled with the assurance that comes with the market leading embedded Linux.

By adopting the Yocto Project, Wind River Linux provides the open source community a base for further embedded Linux innovation. It's more open. It's more agile. It's Yocto Project Compatible, and as such, Wind River Linux has a level of interoperability that eliminates the pain of having to start from scratch….pain that could easily frustrate and drain the energy to innovate.

So, let's blow away that heavy manual that has long weighed down the embedded Linux box, and all that pain with it. Wind River Linux is changing the game again.

 

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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?

Consider this: In the embedded world, building a scalable Linux relies on the availability of a piece of software and set of associated tools. When taking the usual open source input (i.e. a kernel, userspace packages, patches) and your own input (size of the filesystem, kernel configuration), and using the appropriate cross-toolchain would produce different output (one for IA, another for ARM, etc.).

It's not unlike cooking. With the same ingredients (flour, water, salt, sugar) and set of tools (mixer, spoons, rolling pin), you can come out with different results just by slightly changing your recipe (different temperature, proportions, etc.), and in the end you might pull off pizza or bread! Now, think about trying to combine recipes or perform some fine-tuning, without a common set of metrics. One recipe may require a tablespoon, another teaspoon, or liter or gram. This challenge is often what you see in the embedded Linux world before using a standardized environment like the Yocto Project:  No common repository for ingredients (kernel, userspace), no common set of recipes for cross-architecture builds, no common tools (toolchain, makefiles, compilers, debuggers), and no common build system to bake all the ingredients together.

As an embedded Linux distributor who built and maintained our own build infrastructure, I am excited to say that by adopting the Yocto Project as our standard build environment, we’ve removed a major part of the effort and cost of packaging a user-friendly, standards-based embedded Linux distribution.    Now we can focus on developing cool new features and cutting-edge capabilities. In other words, our engineering team is having a lot more fun these days! 

For customers, the value proposition is no vendor lock-in if they adopt the freely available Yocto Project infrastructure or engage with vendors like Wind River who embrace the Yocto Project.   We pride ourselves on delivering the leading embedded Linux solution, while helping our customers manage risk. It’s just good business sense to keep your technology options open.   

The benefits of better interoperability, portability and reuse of our Linux implementation means we can build better stuff cheaper and faster. How great is that?   For our customers, that translates to Wind River’s ability to deliver far greater value at a lower cost. You can see that everyone wins with the Yocto Project!

Wind River is dedicated to advancing the state of embedded Linux, and will continue to support open standard efforts like the Yocto Project to deliver commercial-grade, optimized, open standard offerings that allow our customers to get the greatest value out of their open-source platforms.

I’d be interested to hear your feedback. Please feel free to post comments on what you’re hearing in relation to Yocto.

To stay posted, sign up here.

 

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Linux Foundation’s License Compliance Standard, SPDX, Offers Real Value

By Mark Gisi

There is only one criterion that determines whether a piece of software is open source software (OSS) - the license from which you receive the software under. If you are granted rights under an open source license such as the BSD, Apache or GPL, it is open source software.

Although the open source movement has other core pillars, which include the power of the community development model, peer recognition, and community review (the many eyeballs affect), there is no movement without the license.

Open source developers do not ask for much for the use of their software. What little they do request is described by a few conditional obligations listed in the license. In exchange for satisfying those obligations, the user is granted certain rights with respect to copying, modifying and/or redistributing the developer’s creation. Obligations may include a requirement to pass along the source code, provide certain notifications (e.g., modification notices) or just simply provide attribution. The task of satisfying the respective license obligations is often referred to as license compliance.

It is not uncommon for embedded software developers to use a subset of files of a given OSS package where each file could potentially have its own distinctive license terms. In order to legitimately redistribute software that includes OSS, one must understand all the license terms of the OSS files from which a program is derived.    The effort required is a function of a number of open source files one integrates into their work, which increases in direct proportion to the total number of files.

If a program is derived from just a dozen or so files, determining all the licensing terms often becomes a manageable task. If one leverages the benefits of 100s or potentially 1000s of files, then the task of wading through those source files to determine the license terms can become very costly and is error prone.

To facilitate the license compliance task, the Linux Foundation sponsored the Software Package Exchange (SPDX) working group to produce a standard format for recording all the licensing information found in a package and storing it in a single file or repository. This alleviates the need of rummaging through 1000s, if not 10,000s of source files of an OSS package to determine license terms for a selected subset of files. This also leads to wider more rapid adoption of a given OSS project.

By having a single repository of license information covering all the components found within a OSS package, SPDX 1.0 makes it easier, less error prone and much more cost effective to determine licensing for a given component whether it is a single source file, a library or an entire application.  The ultimate goal is to enable the user of any component contained within a package (file, library or program) to be able to honor the license wishes of the respective copyright holders.

The Linux Foundation released the first version of the specification, SPDX 1.0, back in August of 2011. Since then, we have performed various experiments which included creating SPDX files for a number of popular open source packages and we are happy to report that it delivers on much of the promised utility as describe in the 1.0 specification. Although it is the first release, in its current form, SPDX 1.0 offers significant value to the open source community and its users. I encourage you to check it out at www.spdx.org and get involved. Drop me a note/comment and share your thoughts. I would be happy to share mine. That is, after all, the way great things are created within the open source community.

 

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Wind River Linux: The Thrills Just Keep Coming

By Paul Anderson

When I joined Wind River over ten years ago, there were many in the company and in the embedded industry that saw open source software with extreme skepticism: too big, too slow, too risky, too expensive to maintain, and so forth. Over the years, the industry at large has figured out that open source software, particularly Linux, has an essential role in the embedded ecosystem, just as real time operating systems, software development tools, test frameworks, and many other things play a critical role in developing and deploying embedded device. But, the role of Linux embedded development represents something else, a fundamental change in the way people think and act as it relates to how software is developed, deployed and maintained in the embedded space. Linux is different.

One of the major ways Linux is different is the way it has constantly evolved and expanded over time—not surprising, since thousands of developers turn their eyeballs and their brains upon it every day. To be a successful commercial Linux vendor, one must embrace the velocity of Linux—not necessarily as fast as the open source community but a whole lot faster than traditional embedded software has evolved in the past. The new class of development is much more iterative than the traditional approach to embedded development.

Integrate. Build, Test. Release.

And then do it again and again.

Some are not used to a higher cadence in development, nor in the availability of newer platforms on which to base development. Rather than holding for a “big bang” release, we have chosen to deliver increased functionality incrementally and give our customers a choice in what they adopt. This allows us to pull in newer functionality from upstream sources and get them to customers more quickly. But, it’s not all about just slapping on the latest bits and pushing them out the door. Each release is carefully planned, executed, and validated to ensure the customer is getting the highest quality embedded Linux product possible.

Since our 4.0 release, we’ve added critical tool integrations (update pack 1) and sophisticated graphics capabilities (update pack 2). Which brings me to our latest development: Wind River Linux 4, Update Pack 3. With this one, we got our arms around some state of the art technologies—virtualization, emulation, simulation, to name a few.  We added significantly to our store of BSPs.  So much of what we’ve done is of interest to our networking customers we thought about calling it “The Networking Release. ” Kidding aside, the functionality of this release benefits a much broader group of customers. 

One of things I love about open source is that there are always new features and capabilities in the product that can be used in many new and creative ways. Nobody tells you what to make and how to make it. Instead, we give you the parts and the tools you need to build your own race car, according to your own design. This update pack is full of goodies—including add-on products from several partners—that make your products faster, more sophisticated and more secure.

We’ll show how to use the new functionality and who to call if you’re having problems, and we’ll leave it up to you to come up with the new and creative new embedded products.

Who knows?  Maybe you’re working on a next generation smart energy gateway device. Who are we to say that our new virtual routing and forwarding solution isn’t exactly the piece you need to crawl outside the box and build the killer app?

Please, let me know when you do.

For additional information from Wind River, visit http://www.facebook.com/WindRiverSystems.  

Cloud to Service Endpoints – The Missing Link

By Paul Anderson

I remember as a kid I was fascinated with phones. The idea that you could pick up the phone, dial it, and talk to someone on the other end was pretty neat. And… at the time, a phone was an elegantly designed electro-mechanical work of art, and it was fun to take them apart to try and figure out how they worked. I could understand how the phone itself worked, but as a kid, what happened after those two wires headed off to the pole was somewhat of a mystery to me. Eventually I came to understand the massive infrastructure that allowed reliable telephone service into the home to be possible. Hats off to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

When you think of a basic phone, it seems like such a simple thing. It can receive, it can transmit, and it can provide bidirectional signaling. Receiving and transmitting is obviously important, and it took a while for folks to figure out how to do both simultaneously without a bunch of extra wires and things. Signaling is equally important. The user of the device needs to know when someone is trying to contact them, and to be able to establish contact with someone else out on the network. A phone is actually a very clever thing, particularly when one thinks of what people did with what they had at the time, particularly in a world before the transistor.

But, what is a phone really? It is a service gateway. In its most simple form, it provides telephone service. That service then allows connectivity to other services, like the ability to call the plumber when your sink gets clogged, or order a pizza. Quite amazing! The phone as a communication gateway gave way to a great number of services being offered, including the ability for the average person to communicate information digitally across a vast worldwide communications network. Wow… that’s really cool too.

Fast forward now to modern times. Thanks a few little inventions like the transistor, the integrated circuit, and storage technology, we now live in a word where there is network connectivity, and the ability to access a wide variety of information and services from this thing called The Cloud. Now you can get on-demand movies with the push of a button, or have your refrigerator figure out you are getting low on milk and order more for you. Imagine trying to explain that to our friend Alex, the Phone Guy!

The ideas of services that could be offered from the cloud to an endpoint are coming fast and furious. During this disruptive phase, it is very difficult for equipment manufacturers, carriers, and service providers to stay current. Right now, there is only so much a cable modem, set top box, or digital television can do. And, in the commercial world, retrofitting communications gateways is expensive and time consuming. The missing link is a standards-based smart services gateway that is flexible enough to be able to serve the quickly changing world around us. Without this missing link, it will be difficult to realize the next evolution of services available to us.

Wind River has recognized the need for smart services gateway technology and has developed Wind River Platform for Gateways. This platform allows equipment manufacturers to quickly build smart service gateways for consumer, and M2M applications in the networking, medical, and industrial and other sectors. With Wind River Platform for Gateways, equipment makers have a platform they can use right away to develop service gateways that easily manage connected devices and services at the network edge and also scale to meet the demands of new services.

It will be hard to imagine what will happen next, but one thing is for sure, the service gateways will play a key role in whatever is to come.

 

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Are Penguins Ready to Fly?

By Nithya Ruff

This year, Vancouver, British Columbia was the site for LinuxCon North America 2011, where Linux celebrated its 20^th anniversary.  Vancouver is normally known for its rainy and gray weather, but the Linux gods must have been shining on the Linux celebrations because the weather was spectacular!  In the same year that Wind River celebrates its 30 anniversary, it got me thinking about if this was a forecast of things to come.  

Turning 20 is a coming of age milestone and that can truly be said of Linux.   I see a well-established ecosystem of upstream open source projects, successful commercial companies based on open source and an increasing number of industries that are adopting Linux.   Business models are maturing and there is a good understanding of the value that commercial vendors bring to creating adoption and making it safe to use Linux.  There seems to increasingly be a process for working across and within groups.  Look at what the Linux Foundation does. It provides an umbrella organization for collaboration projects like the kernel, Meego and Yocto to organize and move things forward and advocate for the Linux community very effectively.  It also provides a physical venue for people to gather and meet face to face and create vision and directions. 

Wind River’s own entrance into embedded Linux came in response to our customers’ requirement for us to support Linux.  To meet the needs of our customers, Wind River Linux 1.0 was introduced in 2004 to help companies get commercial level support and roadmaps for embedded devices.  This was very well received and in the short 7 years since, Wind River Linux is a player in all major verticals such as Networking, Aerospace and Defense, Industrial, Medical and Consumer, and has been ranked the #1 embedded Linux by VDC for three consecutive years. In fact, in the last three months, we have launched two game-changing Linux platforms: Wind River Linux Secure, the first commercial embedded Linux platform to achieve EAL4+ certification and Wind River Linux 4 Update Pack 2, the first commercial embedded Linux to provide a pre-integrated hardware-through-middleware graphics stack for multiple hardware platforms.  

The prediction from many keynote speakers at LinuxCon was the coming ‘Internet of things.’ This is the next phase of the Internet where not millions, but billions and even trillions, of smart devices and sensors will be connected to the Internet and deliver intelligent and instrumented services.  The underpinnings of many of these devices is embedded Linux.  The pace of change and the scale of things that this disruption needs, will require us to make this connected open source eco-system across upstream projects, commercial companies and consumers work like it has never before.  Whether it is better collaboration or common standards and business models, we need to be ready to tackle many new users, new industries and just the sheer volume. 

Glad we had the last 20 years to get mature and ready for this exciting journey.  There is nothing more beautiful than penguins in flight!

Fish Finders, Embedded Linux and Graphics

By Paul Anderson 

Here I am up at rustic cabin in Northern Wisconsin enjoying some time off the grid. I feel like Ralph Waldo Emerson getting in touch with nature, and exploring Transcendentalism, except for one minor detail: I have a wireless connection. Emerson was quoted as saying “Nature hates calculators,” and I’m not sure what he would think about the billions of connected devices scattered across the landscape. Not to worry, I’ll be back unplugged soon enough and enjoying some quality time in the “digital free zone.”

I tried my hand at some fishing this week on the little lake we are on. Even though I’m a gadget person in general, I am a very low tech fisherman. With the help of my brother in law, my kids and I just fished the old fashioned way, with a pole, hook, bobber, and worm. It didn’t take long to find the fish, or for the fish to find us. However, there are plenty of high tech anglers out there that use everything from advanced weather forecast maps, fish finders, and even underwater cameras. I find all that technology interferes with the peace of mind that I am looking for when doing things like fishing, but perhaps that is because I am fully immersed in technology as a career.

Modern high end fish finders, GPS units, and other electronics equipment used in the outdoors have become much more sophisticated. The users of deeply embedded devices have come to expect a graphical user interface, low power consumption, and reliability. A similar trend can be found across a spectrum of deeply embedded devices, including industrial control panels, medical equipment, military applications, and of course, consumer equipment.

Although mobile operating systems have been used in some of these devices, many devices use embedded Linux in designs to reduce the complexity, power consumption, and footprint requirements for devices while increasing reliability of the device. For those who have used advanced graphics using Linux in the past, you know that getting the right drivers integrated and the system operating correctly often involves a bit of black magic, and a whole lot of elbow grease (not to mention a rubber chicken, garlic clove, and a ten pound sledge hammer). It is unfortunate, since there are many systems on a chip (SOCs) that have great integrated graphics that are hard for the average embedded developer to actually use in designs.

In talking with our customers about what they wanted from Wind River Linux, integrated graphics capability frequently topped the list. That means having all the right graphics subsystems, packages, and drivers pre-integrated and pre-tested to the greatest extent possible to make inclusion of rich graphics in deeply embedded design as easy as possible on popular hardware, such as ARM and Intel. The great news is that we have delivered these things in our newest version of Wind River Linux 4 Update 2, along with many other exciting features. Learn more about embedded graphics in Linux, and other exciting features in our products here.

And by the way…Wind River was also named the embedded Linux market leader for the third consecutive year by VDC Research Group.

For me, it’s back off the digital grid to enjoy the nature around me.

 

“With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now“

Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Embedded is cool (and getting even cooler)

By Paul Anderson

When people ask me what I do, I never know how to answer the question. Most people state their occupation. But, does that define what we do? I usually respond with something cheeky like “metabolize,” or “provide for those around me” or “go running or fly airplanes any chance I get.” But, usually people want to know what you do for a living. I usually get stumped when they ask that particular question.

I asked my youngest child what he thought I did for a living. He said “play with computers all day,” which is not entirely inaccurate. I asked my oldest, and he said “fly airplanes” (again, I do fly a lot of airplanes, but unfortunately I spend most of my time as a passenger rather than a pilot). My pets would say my entire existence is dedicated to providing them food and entertainment (obviously they have figured something out). My wife would say that I type on the computer, talk on the phone, go to meetings, and spend way too much time in airplanes and at hotels. Although accurate, it doesn’t get at the core of what I do.

When I try to explain to people what I do in any detail, after a minute or so I see their eyes glaze over. I have taken to just saying “I’m in the software business.” I can usually get away with that, but sometime people actually want to know more.

If I say something like “I work with a team of people to create Linux-based optimized commercial software solutions used in the embedded industry,” I definitely get a blank look. In one attempt to explain to my mother what Linux was, I mentioned “open source,” to which she wryly replied “Did you say… open sores?” (rather clever, I thought). The average consumer really has no idea what open source software is, nor should they have to understand it. The word “embedded” is another basically meaningless term to the average person. I usually explain to them that Wind River provides products and services in the creation of the “software goo” that manufacturers put into things like cell phones, network switches, cars, airplanes and many other things that people never think about. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a polite smile followed a polite phrase like “Oh, I see.”

What is interesting is that although “embedded systems” used to be used only when a computer was absolutely necessary to get something done, these systems are now assumed to be in pretty much every device we use. Twenty years ago, the thought of having a computer in a toaster would have been considered the work of Rube Goldberg, but now, a tech-savvy consumer might say “Of course my toaster has a computer in it. How else would I download my toasting patterns to the toaster and have it tweet me when my toast is done!?” Okay, they’re not quite tweeting yet, but there are digital toasters.

Embedded systems are now everywhere, people just don’t think of them as a special case. If I say something like “I work on software that is used in devices that connect consumers to the global network” or “I work on software that is used in medical devices” or “I work on software that allows more efficient use of energy,” people light up and say “Oh, that sounds really interesting!” Sure, underneath it’s the same old embedded software “goo” that makes the world go round, but people are becoming more aware of how embedded devices have changed how we live our lives. They just don’t think of it as “embedded,” but rather an assumption of how things are done.

At the recent Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and the Embedded Linux Conference, I was pleasantly surprised at the great attendance of these events. Although in recent times some of the biggest buzz has been around smart phones and tablets, there is an increasing interest in deeply embedded devices as well. At the Yocto Project informational sessions the sessions were standing room only, and the level of engagement by those attending was very high.

So…I’m thinking that embedded is cool after all. Maybe it just needs a new name.

 

Getting Started with OpenSAF

By Glenn Seiler

Usage of OpenSAF is growing exponentially. The number of companies I hear from that are evaluating or considering using OpenSAF grows every month. A common trend that I see more and more often is that someone in an R&D capacity or someone charged with creating a prototype downloads OpenSAF from opensaf.org and begins working with it, to acquaint them with the technology.  For example, if you are a Wind River Linux user, you can download a pristine version of OpenSAF software directly from the Wind River Developers Network that has been pre-validated and packaged to build with Wind River’s Linux Distribution Assembly Tool (LDAT).  The version of OpenSAF you can download from Wind River Developer Network is exactly the same as the current version of OpenSAF at devel.opensaf.org, except it has been put into a ‘layer’ that is recognized and used by Wind River’s build environment. This can save significant time and effort for companies that want to do a quick analysis or build of OpenSAF.

The most common method for getting support or help for OpenSAF projects is by utilizing “community support.” The Wind River Developer Network is a great place to look for answers or to post a question. This is where members of Wind River’s OpenSAF and Linux engineering community can help. In addition, the OpenSAF project has many helpful documents and mailing lists that can provide help.  There are many mailing lists that you should consider subscribing to, including a developers mailing list that is used by many of the actual developers contributing code to the OpenSAF project.

If community support does not meet your needs, you have a couple of other options. For instance, consider the  Wind River OpenSAF Quickstart offering that includes one year of formal technical support similar to the support we offer with our Linux product. This includes formal TSRs (Technical Support Requests), defect resolution and support calls. In addition, Wind River OpenSAF Quickstart includes a three-day on site consultation to get your project up and running. Wind River has deep technical expertise, including one of the OpenSAF project maintainers on staff to help you get your project started, and some in-house tools to get an initial cluster of nodes up and running.  Wind River OpenSAF Quickstart can significantly help with the installation, configuration and planning of your OpenSAF project.

Another option for getting your project up and running is to license a full-featured OpenSAF product from a commercial provider. These companies usually have an OpenSAF distribution of their own, that may or may not have additional features or enhancements. Additionally, a commercial OpenSAF provider will usually have their own roadmap for new releases and updates and a set of tools that can help configure and build an OpenSAF project. GoAhead Software is the only commercial company I am aware of that has their distribution of OpenSAF. GoAhead has validated their commercial OpenSAF product, called OpenSAFire, with Wind River Linux to ensure that customers have a seamless experience with Wind River Linux and OpenSAF.  Together, Wind River and GoAhead can provide the professional services you may need such as porting legacy applications, extending the functionality of OpenSAF with other features or functions, or developing custom hardware support. 

No matter if you choose to build OpenSAF yourself, or if you leverage a commercial solution, Wind River can provide you with the expertise, support and professional services you need to make your OpenSAF experience a success.