Wind River Blog Network

Processing Paradigm: it's all about capacity

By Mike Deliman

When I was a kid anything that was a computer, or had one in it, was pretty obvious. Computers weren't "just everywhere".  Now we've got multiple CPU chips on a board, multiple CPU cores on a chip, different kinds of cores on a single chip, multiple computer boards in a single chassis, ... it goes on.    These things are embedded in everything around us, all this hardware glued together to achieve something. This brings us to software.  Software has to evolve to keep up with hardware, and with the needs of users.  With all these cores and chips and boards and systems running around, it gets a bit confusing. Software is what enables everything from multi-processing to "poly-processing". There's a lot of buzzwords about it - SMP, AMP, POS, VOS, Real time kernel, Separation Kernels... but what does it all mean? And... what's it for?

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EclipseCon 08, we barely knew ye!

By Doug Gaff

It's a surreal experience to spend 8 months planning a conference only to have it over in the blink of an eye. Now I know how the Foundation Staff feels every year!

First, let me highlight a few of my favorite presentations: Diversity, Eclipse 4.0, RTSC, C++ GUI Builder (NAB), and p2. The Eclipse 4.0 presentation gave us a peek into some ideas for the next platform. I really like the presentation model changes, but to be honest, I'm not sold on the "Eclipse over the Web" concept. I'm sure it will be useful to some in the community, but probably not for the core tools of the device software development market. That being said, the platform team appears to be responding to our concerns about diversity and transparency, and I'm looking forward to Wind River helping with the effort.

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EclipseCon Goodness

By Doug Gaff

It's great to start each day of a morning-to-night conference with a community run. Props to Darin for organizing the event. I may be slow, but at least I'm out there.

Monday brought my first Eclipse Board Meeting. Many thanks to the committer community for electing me to the Board! It's going to be a great learning experience and an interesting challenge. Once I get properly trained in my new duties (sometime in the next couple of weeks), I'll write more.

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Target Communication Framework (TCF)

By Martin Oberhuber

A year ago at EclipseCon, I've been asked a lot whether there wasn't a lightweight Open Source agent for resource-constrained communications with remote systems planned or available.

And now it's here - and much more! The Target Communication Framework (TCF) is not only an extendable agent, it's a whole protocol framework that has the potential to make target communications a lot easier. TCF is a new incubating component of the Eclipse Target Management Project, and its unique benefits include

• Transport-independent multiplexing of multiple services over a single protocol
• Ability to transparently add 3rd party value-adding services in the communication chain
• Auto-discovery and single setup of all target services.

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Running an Eclipse Project

By Doug Gaff

Well, the debate around e4 has showcased that we continue to be a vibrant and lively community. And I really want one of those "Evil Eclipse Platform Lairs" that Chris Recoskie talked about! The closest thing I could find online is a "Web Lair" from a band called ECLIPSE. Check out those mp3's and lyrics! I had an unexplainable urge to bite the head off of a bat. Nick, I challenge you to go Weird Al on one of their songs. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the e4 demos and discussions at EclipseCon.

And speaking of EclipseCon, I have to make a plug for my tutorial: So you want to run a project in Eclipse? It's at 4pm in Room 206.

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Just one more word about E4

By Martin Oberhuber

There's been some hot discussions around the recent announcement of "E4", a new component as part of the Eclipse Platform Project to host code and infrastructure for prototyping ideas towards planning Eclipse 4.0.

I've been both excited and surprised - like others - about this announcement. Excited because some great people finally get together doing some real work for the future of the best Open Source Platform I know. Surprised because I had expected more visibility of those efforts in earlier stages. And despite an excellent background post by Ed Merks and a plead by zx to just have things coming and contribute, there's three "Why"s that I just can't push aside:

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Eclipse 4.0: Will it be diverse and transparent?

By Doug Gaff

I started a small war today on the Planning Council mailing list after reading the Eclipse Project PMC announcement of a new component, called E4, as part of the Eclipse Project Incubator. Excerpt:

Component Description:

During the Eclipse Project 3.4 release cycle, one of the important plan items was "Create the Eclipse 4.0 Plan". The intent of this work was to identify the most pressing issues that would impact the ongoing success of Eclipse, and come up with a plan to address them. The result was the design of a new platform "e4", which will be the basis for Eclipse 4.0.

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"Making Multicore Work" Seminars

By Paul Tingey

February has been a particularly busy month. So busy, in fact, that I was not able to make time to be at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Instead I have spent most of the month completing a tour of seven European cities presenting at a joint Wind River/Freescale/Virtutech seminar series.

The theme of the seminar was "Making Multicore Work". The presentations included details of Freescale's newest and upcoming multicore devices, Virtutech's virtualised software development technology and Wind River's latest VxWorks SMP and multicore debug tools releases.

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