Wind River Blog Network

DSDP Press Coverage

By Doug Gaff

A quick update to my previous post on the recent DSDP project releases. Following is a list of the various media outlets that covered the news, as well as a few that mention DSDP as part of the Eclipse 5th birthday.

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Services and Support Become the Killer Linux Apps

By John Bruggeman

Yet another foreign government organization announced their intent to dump Windows for Linux and open source. Starting in mid-2007, the French parliament will equip the PCs in their deputies’ offices with a Linux operating system and open-source productivity software.

This announcement follows a September update from the city of Munich on the progress of its Linux project initiated back in 2003. If you happen to remember, the Munich project was one of the first to shoot right at the heart of Microsoft’s monopoly and helped fuel an industry debate around the viability and adoption rate of desktop Linux. At the time, the blogosphere lit up with potential speculation around the city’s decision ranging from payback for Microsoft licensing 6.0 to anti-American sentiment surrounding the Iraq war. It all seems like ancient history now, doesn’t it?

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VxWorks 6.4 POSIX PSE52 Conformance Certification

By Paul Parkinson

In the post 'Great News for POSIX', Alex Wilson commented on the announcement that VxWorks has becomes the first operating system to achieve certified conformance to POSIX PSE52 Realtime Controller 1003.13 standard. Alex has also discussed the different POSIX profiles here.

I was thinking about what this announcement means for developers? I have to confess that it's been a while since I spent all my time writing code, but I can clearly remember when I used to write device drivers and interface libraries under SunOS, Solaris, OS-9, LynxOS and VxWorks (wikipedia) to interface enterprise UNIX platforms and RTOS platforms to high-performance digital signal processor (DSP) VME boards.

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BARCO's MOSArt

By Alex Wilson

Another great piece of news!

I was really pleased to see the announcement on BARCO's use of our VxWorks 653 operating system in their MOSArt system.

I remember many years ago when BARCO decided to embark on the MOSArt project and they chose  Green Hills over us, if I recall correctly because at the time we had only just started our ARINC653 product line. Now they have come back to us to build a state-of-the-art environment based on our technology.

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Linux fit for Defense

By Paul Parkinson

In an earlier blog, I commented on the potential use of Linux in Aerospace & Defense, but I didn't provide any background information to support my assertion that people seem to either love or hate Linux, and that often their views are formed from emotive arguments and prejudice rather than rational fact-based discussions.

Last week, Paul Tingey discussed some interesting examples of polarised views in different countries in a recent blog Open Source: Do you love or hate it? So, I thought I should comment on some of the views which have been expressed in relation to the use of Linux in defence.

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Great news for POSIX

By Alex Wilson

If you didn't see the Press announcement, we have just completed our conformance testing of VxWorks to POSIX 1003.13 PSE52 with The Open Group  [IEEE Conformance Web]!!

This adds to the long line of "firsts" for VxWorks, including my favourite of being the first RTOS on MARS!

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Obsolescence and Standardisation

By Alex Wilson

I was reading through one of my (many) news feeds the other day when I came across an excellent article in Flight which reminded me of issues around obsolescence. The contract as for an upgrade to the RAF Spitfires for modifications to the landing gear to accommodate new tubeless tyres.

This reminded me of a presentation given at the COG in Scotland a few years back with the example of the B52, which now has an estimated life-cycle of around 94 years! Both of these examples show systems whose life expectancy has been extended and are now having to cope with "new technologies."

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Open Source: The Universal Model for Innovation?

By John Bruggeman

I came across an interesting article yesterday from the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site. The article is about an assistant professor,  Karim Lakhani at HBS who conducted some research on how an open source “broadcasting” model taken from software development scenarios, might work among scientists trying to solve scientific problems. According to his research results, practices in the open source software community do in fact offer a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving. The research team discovered that when a problem resides in one domain of expertise, the solution may reside in another domain because innovation happens at the intersection of disciplines. By broadcasting a problem to outsiders, solutions were often found much faster than situations that did not incorporate open source practices.

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Open Source: Do you love it or hate it?

By Paul Tingey

Paul Parkinson's recent post Linux in Aerospace and Defense outlined some of the questions being raised about the adoption of Linux in missions critical applications. Of course as Linux has evolved over the last few years, it's "suitability for purpose" has been questioned by just about everyone who has come into contact with it.

This analysis often leads to one of two outcomes as mentioned in Paul's post; you either love it or you hate it. However, it's interesting to note that this love or hate relationship often extends to the whole notion of open source in general.

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Red Hat is NOT Carrier-Grade Linux

By Glenn Seiler

There was a very interesting announcement yesterday from Red Hat regarding a collaboration with Nokia for carrier grade server systems. The most interesting thing I noticed about this news was how the term “Carrier Grade Linux” was not mentioned once in the entire document. There were several mentions of Carrier Grade Servers – it even went so far as calling them Enterprise Servers, but not one mention of Carrier Grade Linux.

One of the really beneficial things about standards like the OSDL’s Carrier Grade Linux is that they exemplify the very best practices in open source. Carrier Grade Linux is an open specification that 6 different Linux vendors have compliance with. This compliance delivers the promised value of open source: avoiding monopoly, delivering a level playing field and avoiding vendor lock-in. Funny thing that Red Hat is the only major Linux vendor that is not participating in the Carrier Grade Linux standards effort. I guess if you consider yourself the Microsoft of the Linux world, then you might falsely think that you ARE the standard. I like to believe that logic always prevails and Red Hat might do well to think through this premise: if you are NOT supporting the accepted standards than you must be NON-STANDARD!

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Compliance vs Conformance?

By Alex Wilson

What is the difference between compliance and conformance and what does that mean to you and me? Or more importantly what does this mean to your project?

Well, compliance is an informal industry term generally accepted to mean the system provides support for some of a given standard. Technically, an OS that provides only one API of a POSIX standard is "compliant," though not very useful. Vendors of compliant systems are generally expected to offer documentation describing which parts of the standard are supported, and which are not. Wind River for instance, has such a statement to show "compliance" levels of its VxWorks Operating System against the various POSIX standards. This reads like 100% conformance to SCA 2.2.1 (another POSIX Subset for Software Defined Radio) etc.

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Would You Pay $1200 for a Game Console?

By John Bruggeman

The long-awaited Sony PlayStation 3 game console launched today in Tokyo. Man, I haven’t seen a line that long since I promised my son we’d camp out at Barnes and Noble to get him a copy of the hottest book around,  Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire the day it released back in 2000. Well wait a minute - now that I think about it, maybe the line to get a Tickle-me-Elmo for my niece at FAO Schwartz on Black Friday might have been longer in the late 90’s. Oh and then there was that line for Halo 2 in 2004…

No matter, PS3 is just the latest example of how supply and demand is an economic principle alive and thriving thanks to today’s pop culture. Even though PS3 will retail at $499 - $599 U.S., given the limited quantity immediately available for the holiday rush, the wild supply/demand roller coaster will have the potential to cause a severe “loss of stomach” effect on American consumers – you know the feeling when you dream you are falling? News reports are predicting that for those of us who will be working on November 17, the day PS3 launches on our continent, we can expect to pay upwards of $900 - $1200 U.S. via online auctions – the only place the consoles will be available.

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Contact lost with Mars Global Surveyor

By Mike Deliman

Contact lost with Mars spacecraft

Nasa's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft has been out of contact with Earth for more than a week. Engineers have been trying to re-establish communication with the probe, which could be showing its age after 10 years in space. The spacecraft has entered "safe mode", awaiting further instructions from controllers on Earth.

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DSDP: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

By Doug Gaff

Following up on today’s announcement of milestones in three of the DSDP projects—eRCP 1.0, MTJ 0.7, and TM 1.0—I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on DSDP…how it started, where it is today, and where it’s heading. First, let me start with a timeline of project events.

March 2005. Unofficially, the DSDP project got its start at a BoF session during EclispeCon last year. At the BoF, several device software tools vendors assembled to discuss the need for more embedded-specific functionality in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging area. There was acknowledgment of CDT and its extensive contribution to tooling in the embedded space, but there was also a desire to see more enhancements in the Eclipse Platform and more of a breadth of functionality around device software development. Shortly after EclipseCon, Wind River proposed the DSDP project and its two initial sub-projects, Target Management and Device Debugging. The TM project set out to build a framework and UI for managing remote embedded devices. The DD project initially focused on working with the Eclipse Platform Debug team to create a more customizable debugging framework in the Platform.

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Remote System Explorer 1.0 is released

By Martin Oberhuber

The Target Management Project is pleased to announce its first public release: The Remote System Explorer (RSE) 1.0 is now available for download as well as the project update site.

RSE is a framework and toolkit in Eclipse Workbench, that allows you to connect and work with a variety of remote systems, including

• remote file systems through SSH, FTP or dstore agents (seamless editing of  remote files including remote search and compare),
• remote shell access (compiling with error navigation),
• remote process handling through dstore agents,
• and remote debugging through CDT / gdb.

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Precipice...

By Mike Deliman

[Editorial by Mike]

5 years hard work
120 minutes great excitement (launch)
7 months boredom (cruise)
6 minutes of sheer terror (EDL)
Ninety  One Thousand+ days of exploration

It all started like this...

January 2001... I received a call from a cohort, someone I hadn't heard from in a long time.

It was, for me, a very happy call.

"Mike, we're putting the team back together.  We're going back to Mars.  Who's available?"

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Is safety-critical ready for multi-core?

By Paul Parkinson

You may feel that you're experiencing déjà vu reading this blog, but the title 'Is safety-critical ready for multi-core?' is different to an earlier blog, which was 'Is multi-core ready for safety-critical?'.

In the earlier blog, I discussed some recent developments in multi-core processors in the context of their suitability for use in safety-critical systems. In this blog, I want to discuss how a particular type of safety-critical system could exploit the capabilities of multi-core devices. However, before I dive into the details, I should really outline the different types of safety-critical systems (at least in the simple categories which I like to use).

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Live from Amsterdam: Day 2 Observations from the 2006 Inaugural Open Source in Mobile Event

By Glenn Seiler

The audience was a little lighter today. I guess that’s to be expected since we are in Amsterdam and there just might be some other distractions this fun city has to offer.

Today’s sessions started out with a bang by continuing the fragmentation theme. The first two presenters were from .orgs focused on establishing standards in the mobile Linux industry: LiPS, (Linux in Phone Standards) followed by OSDL MLI, the Mobile Linux Initiative. These two .orgs communicated a noticeably different approach to solving the Linux mobile phone solution versus what we heard from the X Foundation yesterday.  It was interesting to hear both standards representatives zero in on the fact the Telco industry, as it stands today, was defined by standards. The LiPS representative even posed the very question I was pondering: “How can you have a Linux mobile phone without telecom standards?” Anyone out there who can offer up a compelling answer?  It was clear from the LiPS and OSDL MLI presentations that they have defined their focus areas and have created standards initiatives that are very complimentary to each other. LiPS is focusing on the middleware and application layers. OSDL MLI is focusing on the kernel.

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Could the Mobile Phone be the Next PC?

By Glenn Seiler

Will 2007 be the year for mass adoption of Linux in smart phones? This question is the one on everyone’s minds here at the inaugural Open Source in Mobile Event. Taking place in Amsterdam today and tomorrow, this event brings together service providers, carriers, software and hardware vendors, ISVs and everyone else involved in the open source in mobile community. Day one just concluded and since I’m here I thought I’d share some observations that caught my attention.

Needless to say, as this is the inaugural event, my expectations were low. Much to my surprise though, the event has been well attended with over 100 paying attendees. Worth noting to anyone who doesn’t believe Linux will have an impact on the mobile phone market: given the level of attendees participating, I feel pretty safe in concluding that manufacturers are taking the opportunity in mobile Linux very seriously.

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To Boldly Go...

By Mike Deliman

Seen on SlashDot - did Viking miss signs of life on Mars?

The science facts behind the SlashDot article support that idea.  Remember - in 1976 scientists didn't know a whole lot about Mars; Viking was really the first successfull attempt to put a science observatory on another planet with the idea of operating for more than a few moments.  Viking was designed with what was known about Earth, and some ideas scientists had about Mars.

"Benzenecarboxylates, oxalates, and perhaps acetates " are the telltales this analysis claims the scientists should have been looking for.  But how could they know for sure?

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Hello old friend

By Dan Poirot

This just showed up in my Inbox in 14-point Marketing type:

Wind River To Support Sun's Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Multithreaded Next-Generation Processor

So 'Hello' old friend, the years have been really good to you! Has it really been 20 years?

SPARC and I are old friends. I was a Sun-4 and SPARC sysadmin back in the day when the greater fraction of the studio audience was stuffing quarters into the 'Ms. Pac-Man' machine down at the local arcade and pizza parlor. (I was a Tempest man myself) The SPARC was the picture of minimalistic performance - in a pizza box!

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Microsoft Endorses Wind River Strategy

By John Bruggeman

In an effort to provide Windows and Linux interoperability, Microsoft and Novell announced an interesting partnership yesterday. The announcement said this partnership will enable “customers to realize unprecedented choice and flexibility through improved interoperability and manageability between Windows and Linux.”

Is Microsoft strongly endorsing Wind River by following in our footsteps with a dual-OS strategy? OK, so maybe I am reading more into it than the great thinkers in Redmond intended. Strong endorsement might be a bit of a stretch. Indirect endorsement? Seven- degrees-of-separation? You get the point.

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Shared Source and Windows CE

By Doug Gaff

I read with some excitement Microsoft's recent announcement of their shared source release of Windows CE 6.0. Microsoft has clearly recognized what many RTOS companies have known for a while – device software developers want and need easy access to the OS source code, both for debugging and for customization. This is a great move that will surely benefit developers.

What really piqued my interest, though, was the shared source initiative under which CE 6.0 was released. Microsoft has three different shared source license agreements in this initiative, plus a couple of variations. I'm not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt, but it appears they have loosely modeled the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) after the Apache License and the Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) after the Mozilla Public License.  From my reading of these two licenses, I believe they qualify as official open source licenses as defined by the Open Source Initiative.  I wonder if the OSI has the same opinion.

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MS taking some pain out of WinCE?

By Mike Deliman

Microsoft has released WinCE 6.0 - this time as a "shared source" release, with various enhancements.  Some of the big claims-to-fame: It's the "first commercial hard real-time OS released as a shared-source product".

I'm not sure exactly what this means.  Perhaps they're using their source licensing model - "shared sourcing" - as a qualifier?  Since it's the only RTOS made by Microsoft with sources shared through their license, that makes the "shared" part true.  From that perspective, there are licensing options for source code from most proprietary OS companies, you just can't post it all to the web for anyone to download.

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Pentagon urges 'relevant' R&D

By Paul Parkinson

In a recent article in EETimes ('Pentagon urges 'relevant' R&D' , 23rd October 2006, pages 1 & 80), George Leopold reported on a marked shift in US federal R&D funding away from high-risk, high-reward defence research towards technologies needed to counter immediate threats.

There appears to have been some indications of this emerging trend in recent years, but this definitive position could have a significant impact on the approach taken in the development of many programmes. During the Cold War era, the nature of the threat and an enemy’s capability could be predicted,  and the development of new defence technologies could be planned and executed over quite long development timescales, sometimes even spanning decades in the case of projects such as the RA-66 Comanche helicopter, F-22 Raptor, and the Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft (wikipedia).

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Telecoms equipment can be cool (honestly)

By Paul Tingey

Many years ago, at a previous company, I spent my days writing assembler code for the 68302 processor and watched enviously as other (more fortunate) engineers wrote "modern" C++ applications for Pentium-II desktop PCs. In the canteen at lunchtime, no-one wanted to listen to my witty anecdotes about humorous 68K register names. At a technology level, embedded systems just weren't "cool".

However, times are changing. Desktop PCs may now offer dual core processors but, in reality, todays technology revolution is driven by a telecoms infrastructure that enables rich applications based on VoIP, Multimedia services and mobile communications. On the back of this revolution, the technology inside telecoms infrastructure equipment is getting pretty cool.

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“Hugging it Out” with Open Source…

By John Bruggeman

Congratulations Microsoft. Responding to your community? Embracing an open source model in a non-trivial way? These are big, admirable steps I thought I would never personally witness. It always makes my day to see another industry leader make business decisions based on the same market premises I believe. Customers want choice and flexibility. For those of us in the industry that haven't learned the lesson by now, the key enabler has become community developed standards. By working together, we only make each other stronger.

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