One of the most common Google searches I see in my Feedjit log is from
people looking for help in the whole Subversive versus Subclipse
debate. It has always dumbfounded me why we have two efforts building
Eclipse team providers for Subversion. But I've long given up on
fighting that battle.
So
as I start to dive into the code for qemu, I found myself in need of
making that choice again. Some would say go with Subversive since it's
an Eclipse project. I would, but they are mired in provisioning hell
with a key component for making it work being on another site due to
licensing/IP reasons. That didn't turn me on much so I'm going with
Subclipse.
I've been "nose to the grindstone" since the holiday break getting our
Wind River Installer out the door, twice. But the good news is that the
CDT contributors have been very busy working on CDT 6.0 while I wasn't
looking very hard. I have been waiting for the C/C++ IDE Package for M5
to be built. In the meantime, we do have the bits up on the CDT Galileo
update site for you to try. Just download the Eclipse Platform or SDK 3.5M5 and add the following URL as an update site:
Most
people will want the "Tools" feature in the "Main" group, which will
give you everything you need to work with the gnu toolchain. And yes,
the features say 5.1.0, but we're tricking the API tooling with that to
keep track of API changes. We'll be 6.0 when we go out the door in June.
I'm not going to say much with this one. I'll just refer you to the comments people are adding to Boris's blog entry on his work with Mozilla
to get an experimental IDE running in a browser with an Eclipse-based
server back-end. Is this what developers working in the embedded and
desktop space are asking for? Not that I've heard. And neither do a
number of the commenters on Boris's article. Some of them are putting
it in much prettier words than I could say without getting into
trouble...
That's why it is so critical for those of us in the
Eclipse community who support such users to make sure Eclipse continues
to work well and to improve in the areas that cause them pain. Is the
future of enterprise development so different from desktop and embedded
that it requires such radical architectures? Maybe so. If that's true,
we need to hold our ground and ensure we don't get dragged down a path
we can't be going.
The topic of data securityis finding its way into mainstream media news reports these days, often due to high-profile lapses or breaches; and whilst encryption is sometimes mentioned in passing, the media reports rarely delve into the detail.
So, on Wednesday evening when I had the opportunity to attend a local history talk about the Enigma machine
and other encryption devices, I jumped at the chance. In addition to
listening to the talk, I saw a number of working exhibits, including
two Enigmas and a Russian Fialka which was used in the Cold War.
Spring is always a busy time from a marketing perspective. Now, I
live in Ottawa, and spring is certainly not here yet, snow and ice is
still on the ground and there are certainly a few storms in our future.
Still, marketing-wise there is a lot of preparation on-going, read on
for more details.
Firstly there is a new whitepaper, jointly authored by Intel and Wind River (registration required). The paper provides a good overview of the technologies involved. One of the quotes I like is "The trend towards multi-core is well underway, as evidenced by Intel® dual-core and quad-core processor shipments exceeding single-core processors."
When we hear the words "Mobile World Congress" we
immediately think of a huge trade show focused entirely on the latest
and greatest smartphone technology. Over
the past few years smarthphones have certainly generated a lot of
attention. This year was no exception. Pre-event buzz was all about
Google’s Android open source platform. Oddly, only a few announcements
have been made, Huawei’s entry into the smartphone market with
their Android-based prototype and the new HTC phone, Magic.
But Mobile World is about so much more. Long before smartphones
entered the scene, Mobile World Congress (3GSM) had a huge focus on
next generation network technologies. I'm happy to report the real buzz
going on at this year's show was not on the end user device but on the
next generation infrastructure, Long Term Evolution (LTE).
I love the mobile industry because everyone, even my cat, has somehow turned into an industry sage, predicting that just about anything can and will happen in mobile as the dark clouds collect on the economic horizon. Are there any bright spots (to use an overused analogy this week) left in mobile after we hear of precipitous drops in chipset sales and phone volumes, slackening subscriber demand, and workforce "adjustments?" Well, while talking to a group of executives from a large global operator recently about "killer" things (the talk was about signature applications) I had an epiphany: isn't the recent creation of an entirely new device category that every single ISV, consortia, chipset vendor, consumer electronics company, OEM or ODM, and service provider are starting to coalesce around something to take note of? Clearly making a market and getting an entire technology industry to move on a dime is no easy trick, not even for companies like Google and Intel. Yet over the past two years, these companies have started to change the face of the mobile industry (I am not a sycophant in either camp so please reader, take heart). Indeed, Intel's creation of the MID category has turned on a perpetual motion machine that especially mobile network operators can no longer ignore given the enormous role that new devices play in adding new subscribers. Given that the MID software coming out is truly next generation (I have seen it), my view (pundits aside) is that MIDs will be the bright spot of 2010, as terminals with 4" screen diagonals fully cannibalize the ancient meaning of high-end smartphones and cause everyone from Apple to Orange to Nokia create slots for this device type.
It's "Family Day" here in Ontario, Canada, and while my one son is over
at his buddy's house and my other son is watching game trailers and my
wife is out for lunch with the girls, I'm sitting here enjoying the day
off. I'm sure we'll do something family-ish later today...
Anyway, I just read about TI's new family of chips, the OMAP4.
The big news is that this is the first time TI has jumped on ARM's
multi-core bandwagon and the mixture of parts going into these SOCs is
quite impressive. You have PowerVR's venerable SXG OpenGL ES 2.0
engine, image processing, and enough power to play 1080p video. As the
TI guys says in the LinuxDevices.com article, this type of architecture
really will start to blur the lines between smartphones and MIDs (and
even makes me wonder about the set-top box market). It looks like we'll
be seeing some pretty exciting products ahead.
People are no longer surprised to see a multicore processor in a laptop. In
fact, some quad core laptops have already been announced.
How
about your trusted cell/smart phone then? Many of the models there
already have multiple processors. For example an ARM processor for
applications, a DSP for baseband and a voice and video accelerator for
the multi-media experience.
The designs so far have been very different from what you have on
your laptop, different processors (ARM vs Intel), different Operating
Systems (Symbian, mobile versions of Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile ...).
However, this is slowly changing and Apple is one of the companies
changing the game.
I've had a breakthrough on my suspend issues. It seems that the Dell
Connection Manager Service was causing the suspend problem. As a
reminder, I have the 5530 HSPA AT&T card. When you install Dell
Control Point (DCP) and the associated drivers, you get Dell Connection
Manager, which is supposed to help manage all of your network devices.
Mostly it's redundant with the Network Center in Vista, but you do need
it to connect to the Internet over the WWAN card.
As I've complained before,
I don't like DCP. It's Dell QuickSet gone horribly wrong. So I've been
actively trying to replace it. In my searching for something else to
manage the WWAN card, I found an alternative utility called Dell Wireless Manager.
It's bundled with the 5530 drivers, but if you poke around on Dell's
FTP site, maybe you can find it for the other WWAN cards, too. It's a
nice little app for enabling/disabling the card, connecting, looking at
bandwidth usage (very important now that AT&T's data plan is 5GB /
month), etc. It doesn't work right away when you install it, though,
saying that it can't detect a WWAN card.
One
of the questions I have been wrestling with is how to best demonstrate
capabilities related to multicore and virtualization. Demonstrations
involving booting, restarting a core, quickly reconfiguring virtual
board layout, performance and so forth are all very important, but
demonstrating them is rather dull. There is no fireworks, nothing that
grabs attention with a Zang.
It gets better of course
when you add graphics to the mix, maybe multiple Linux virtual boards
combined with multiple VxWorks virtual boards on a dual-core processor,
where one of the Linux boards handles graphics, VxWorks handles some
form of hardware, maybe a sensor, an actuator, CAN bus or radio.
Slashdot pointed me to this article by Bruce Parens
aimed at clearing some of the air around using GPL and LGPL and
commercially licensed product on the same device. Of course, the
summary of the article is "Check with your lawyer" as it should be. But
I hope it alleviates fears over the FSF licenses that I know people
have.
I especially like the description of the motivation that
open source developers use to license their software. BSD is a "gift"
software license. The developer is giving it to you as a gift, do with
it as you wish, just give him some of the credit. LGPL is "non-gift".
And I get it. They essentially don't want you using their stuff for
free unless you help with it. And then you have GPL, which falls into
the category that they just don't want you using their stuff for free,
unless you're doing your stuff for free too. This categorization puts a
little bit of a human face on it, and I appreciate that.
This significant milestone was discussed on the BBC Radio 4 business programme 'The Bottom Line' on Saturday. During the programme, two key questions were raised: firstly, whether the 747 had changed people's lives; and secondly, whether the 747 has improved service or not? I listened with interest, as I had just flown back to London from Cape Town from the Wind River A&D Seminars on a British Airways Boeing 747-400 the previous day.
The
question of impact of the 747 on people's lives is hard to dispute. The
747's impressive range, speed and capacity have brought long-haul
destinations around world within reach of many people, and has also
drastically reduced travel times. The 747 also is affectionately
referred to by many people as a 'jumbo jet', and even after having
flown on a 747 many times, I still find it an awesome sight when it
comes into view at an airport departure gate.
We had a meeting a few days ago amongst interested parties in an
Eclipse IDE distribution for embedded. The idea would be to do
something like I'm doing with Wascana which is supposed to make it easy
for developers using open source tools, students especially, to get
them up and running on Windows, and in turn showcase the features of
the CDT in that environment. The idea of doing this for embedded would
be to do the same for embedded systems developers and to show case the
features of the DSDP project at Eclipse as well as CDT's embedded
development support.
One
thing I think we noticed quite quickly is the diversity of the embedded
community at Eclipse. We have Web services applications for embedded,
we have J2ME Java for embedded, we have deeply embedded systems like
microkernels and DSPs that have no OS per se, and, of course, we have
the more traditional RTOS systems. I think it'll be hard to showcase
Eclipse support for all these things in one distro, and maybe it
deserves it's a few such distros, or maybe we have RTOS versus not
RTOS. It's an interesting initiative and I'm excited to see where it
goes.
This is one for all the numerologists out there to ponder.
Next
Friday, 13th Feb 2009, at 11:31:30 PM GMT/UTC UNIX time, the number
used by UNIX systems such as Linux to calculate the current date and
time, will be 1234567890.
It looks like the next Linux kernel release 2.6.29 (RC3 as of now) will
contain WiMAX support (stack, and device driver for Intel® WiMAX/WiFi
Link 5050) finally, after some tries.
Support for WiMAX clients is welcomed as wireless broadband providers continue to roll-out 802.16 based wireless networks.
Due to the cost structure and the adaptability also to license-free bands,
WiMax has the potential to bring wireless broadband to the masses in
developing countries where no copper wire or fibre infrastructure
exists and is unlikely to exist because of the wide coverage and,
sparse population per square kilometre.
This was the start of a great success story for developers and
development tool / plug-in providers, no question. (For those of you
who are new to Eclipse: it provides, beside it's famous Java support,
integrated development environments also for C/C++ and other languages,
plus recent enhancements to support mobile devices and thin/think
clients.)
At this time there were some gaps for us embedded developers, which were addressed by Wind River joining
the Eclipse Foundation about a year later and proposed, as a Strategic
Developer Member of Eclipse, the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP) project, focusing first on better target management and device debugging.
Recently, during many customer engagements, a common question has
started to emerge, "What additional plug-ins are there for Workbench
(Eclipse) for version control, i.e. Subversion"?
The overall consensus after poking the internal teams at Wind River seem to be "Subclipse" - http://subclipse.tigris.org/
Following my post
yesterday about Motorola and Android today I read that Vodafone is also
renewing it's commitment to Linux and Open Source Software via the LiMo
foundation
Um, yeah, Wascana 1.0 keeps slipping. Work has been very busy leaving
little time for me to work on it, but that should be clearing up in the
next few weeks (I hope!). But as I did my testing for the release
candidate of CDT 5.0.2, as I expected, I ran headlong into the gdb 6.8
issue that everyone seems to run into. I don't know how many people I
see on my Feedjit log searching for: "gdb eclipse No source available
for "ntdll!LdrAccessResource()". And I hope those people now find this
blog entry instead.
The
issue is that before gdb 6.8, there was no way to issue pending
breakpoints using the MI protocol we use to talk to gdb. I think it was
introduced in 6.7 from the CLI, but that doesn't help us. To support
breakpoints in shared libraries, we need to keep retrying to set those
breakpoints on every shared library load event. That worked for many
years. But now, the break on shared library event in the MinGW gdb 6.8
really messes up the CDT. And it's mainly because it doesn't work in
gdb any more.
Motorola
announced yesterday it will ship an Android-based phone by the end of
the year. It has not abandoned it's Windows Mobile phone development
but has at least postponed development and further releases for a year.
Could this be another example of the current economic conditions
pushing a major manufacturer towards further embracing Open Source
Software?
Sure
the numbers don't look good. Lots of red numbers indicating losses
where not so long ago profits were looking good (not great, but good).
So I was sitting watching my 40" HDTV the other day, and started
thinking about why web browsing on a TV pretty much sucks, even with
all the pixels you get at 1080i or what have you. And trust me, I tried
it with our PS3 and other than watching YouTube videos, it's not a good
experience.
But
while I was sitting there on my couch (or sofa, depending on your
English dialect) a pretty normal distance from the TV, I held my hands
up to frame the size of the picture at arms length. Then lowering it to
may lap, it struck me. The size of the picture isn't any bigger than a
handheld gaming box, maybe slightly bigger than an iPod Touch (as I try
to find one for my son's birthday on Thursday :( ).
The Wind River Blog Network is made up of a variety of voices: executives, technologists, and field engineers. Our mission is to foster direct conversations with our customers, partners, and colleagues in the device software industry.
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