Wind River Blog Network

Test Automation Meets Simulation

By Paul Henderson

I'm seeing increasing interest from many companies in using simulation environments with test automation systems to accelerate the testing process. Specifically, putting Wind River Test Management together with Wind River Simics is getting creative juices flowing in industry thought leaders.

Why? Well, development teams have started to realize the benefits of simulation systems for speeding and validating system and software design, and for accelerating software development and debug in advance of hardware availabilty. And even when hardware is available, systems like Simics provide tremendous access and control to speed analysis and diagnsotics.

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Primary Virtualization Use Case

By Mark Hermeling

This topic invariably comes up when talking to customers, unfortunately, there is not just one, but several primary use cases. There are multiple ways to look into the various use cases. The one I like best is to look at generic drivers. An alternative is to look at actual usages in the various industries.

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VxWorks = Secure

By Nikhil Chauhan

A recent report describes potential security vulnerabilities in devices running VxWorks. Researcher HD Moore claimed during a recent talk ( slides) that a quarter million devices accessible directly from the Internet were found to be vulnerable.

VxWorks has a very strong track record of offering secure products. However, we also realize that vulnerabilities can affect VxWorks, even if very infrequently. In those cases, Wind River will act quickly to address any issues. Regarding recent vulnerabilities, Wind River responded rapidly with patches and remediation steps in conjunction with a public announcement by the CERT Coordination Center on August 2, 2010. Once CERT notified Wind River, Wind River immediately assessed the alert and was instructed by CERT to release a synchronous public response. We're confident that our customers know that Wind River is committed to supporting its products with the highest quality and security standards.

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Inadequate Management Visibility into Quality is Eroding Confidence

By Paul Henderson

Here’s the next installment in my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog postings).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.com and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.

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Compressed Schedules Driving Shorter Testing & Defect Resolution Requirements

By Paul Henderson

Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry testing survey conducted in April-May 2010 with almost 900 respondents (see previous blog posting).  If you’d like a copy of the full report in pdf, please drop me an email at paul.henderson@windriver.comand I will send it to you.

In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.

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Bill-Of-Material

By Mark Hermeling

Bill-of-material is something that is important in many devices and I have argued before that virtualization can help with this. Say you have a medical device like an MRI scanner, it is not uncommon that this device has three processors that collaborate. One processor, often in a separate box like an industrial PC, runs MS Windows and is the operator interface, possibly with touch-screen GUI. This is where the results are displayed.

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What a month!

By Mark Hermeling

I have been back in Ottawa now for just over a week after my 5 week trip through Europe and am working through my notes from the past month. And what a month it has been, in an earlier post I jokingly declared 2010 the year of embedded virtualization and this is certainly ringing true.

An overview of the activities of last month will present a decent picture of the status of embedded virtualization and the interest.

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Radioactive Telepresence

By Mike Deliman

How timely!  A couple of months ago the discussion started - "will unmanned vehicles make a transition into civilian use".  I've been taking the stance that since we're talking vehicles - not just aircraft but all forms of non-stationary robot, that it is inevitable.  Even with aircraft I believe it is inevitable, though it may take a little longer for unmanned / automated aircraft to be certified for use in civilian airspace.

It would make sense that robots would be deployed for things that are either impossible for humans to do, or for things that are hazardous and dangerous.  On the impossible-for-humans side, quick return deep-dive missions in the ocean, and several-day long monitoring missions come to mind, as well as some interesting possibilities for telepresence tourism.  The hazardous side is easy to imagine - everything from maintenance of city infrastructures to handing toxic or radioactive substances would be fair game to use robots for, as well as underground mining.

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Taiwan's Technical Prowess

By Nikhil Chauhan

Taiwan's high tech industry is dominant in PC-IT, Broadband CPE products like Wireless AP Routers, DSL/Cable modems, Portable Media Players, Low End Routers, Switches, Smart Phone and IP-STB/IPTVs.  Some of the reasons for this prowess are explained here.

Ever wondered just how big some of these Taiwan and APAC based OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers), ODM (Original Design Manufacturers) and EMS (Electronic Manufacturing Service) companies are?

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Domesticated Robotics?

By Mike Deliman

A discussion about robotics was started up in an online discussion forum.  A question was posed to the group:

Will unmanned vehicles eventually see duty in civilian applications?

Technology for unmanned military vehicles may eventually trickle down to commercial applications on Main Street. In the near future, autonomous vehicles will be used to deliver packages, collect garbage and fill potholes. http://bit.ly/bSrqfx

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Blog Article: Boundaries are Disappearing

By Mark Hermeling

Ok, so I got a little bit of flak verbally, through email and Skype for unilaterally declaring 2010 the year of embedded virtualization. People seem to agree though, it is a hot technology, and a technology that can change the way that we develop embedded systems.

This post by George Zimmerman talks about how integration of technologies leads to inflection points in the adoption of new technology.

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Stark Bloggin' Mad!

By Emeka Nwafor

Wow!!! OK, so how is it that a few innocent tweets about the iPad gets me embroiled in a little Twitter / blogosphere skirmish with a colleague? Who would have thunk it? It's not just Schaefer, almost everyone seems to have formulated an opinion or a prediction about the future of mobile computing.

Following last week's announcement of the Apple iPad there has been an impressive flood of blogs, microblogs, and YouTube from pundits and pranksters, alike.  I don't recall a technology preview that had as much publicly generated hype and excitement as the iPad announcement.

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2010 Is The Year Of Embedded Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

I believe that 2010 will be the year of embedded virtualization, all the signs point in the right direction. It always takes a while for new technology to grab the imagination of embedded device developers.

Embedded developers are traditionally a conservative bunch, however, the benefits of virtualization can not be ignored, even by them.

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Meet Wind River at CES

By Nikhil Chauhan

ABI Research recently stated here that connected home devices are the “Next Big Thing” in the consumer electronics industry with a global market value growing by a compound average of 23% annually over the next five years to more than $10 billion in 2014.

This correlates with Broadband Forum's claim in their recent whitepaper, where they acknowledge that the global demand for broadband Internet access is as strong as ever. As I indicated in my earlier blog post, there are several use cases that are leading to this growth of internet traffic and increased broadband need.

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Article: Multi-Core Slow Down

By Mark Hermeling

An interesting article by Dan Woods on Multi-core slowdown. The article tries to temper people's expectations with regards to mArticle: Multi-Core Slow Downulticore. The basic argument goes: A multicore processor has more raw processing power, but it requires the software load that runs on top of that processor to be able to use those cores, if not, the software could run at the same speed as single-core, or even slower.

One of the ways to use all the cores of course is multi-threaded programming in combination with an SMP operating system that can schedule over all the cores (SMP being Symmetric Multi Processing). Typically multi-threaded programs use multiple threads of execution and use synchronization primitives to make sure executions happens in the right order.

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M2M, the Buzzword

By Nikhil Chauhan

The one I am referring to is an abbreviation of Machine to Machine.

It's simply a communication mechanism between machines or devices. The communication is done with minimal or no human intervention, hence the term machine. If interested, Wikipedia has a much more elaborate definition here.

M2M is getting a lot of traction within the connected device community because it touches many industry verticals spanning from industrial, consumer, energy, automotive and medical to name a few.

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Twenty

By Mike Deliman

In 1989 I got my first "real" job, left an auto shop I'd been working at in Santa Cruz, and started working for a pre-tech-bubble company.  Integrated made VME racks, boxes from the size of a large toaster all the way up to racks larger than your kitchen refrigerator.  We also ported, maintained and sold versions of BSD Unix and something I'd never heard of before that we called Uniworks.

Uniworks was this shrink-wrapped version of someone else's product - this tiny company up in Emeryville that was churning out this incredible tiny unix-like system.

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Primary Multicore Software Configurations

By Mark Hermeling

Many people ask the question as to what the best approach would be for them to go to multicore and/or virtualization. This is a great question to start a discussion as there is not a single silver bullet.

I meant to post a quick diagram on the different multicore configurations before, but life has been busy since we announced the Wind River Hypervisor earlier this year. Busy in this case is certainly a good thing.

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G.hn, does it get the crown for in-home networking?

By Nikhil Chauhan

The new buzzword in wired networking is G.hn, pronounced as "G dot hn".

I know, it does add another word to the alphabet soup of technologies, but I do think that it solves a fundamental lingering problem.

Our homes have various types of wiring available today; these constitute power, cable, phone, etc. The problem is that all of these satisfy their own purposes. The technologies today are fragmented; big time! There are MOCA (adopted in Verizon's fiber network) and HomePNA (AT&T's U-Verse network is based on this) that use coaxial wiring for CPE devices.

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Addressing Core Issues

By Mark Hermeling

A good article from colleague Jens Wiegand on multicore in medical devices. Jens talks about consolidation and innovation, two driving factors in both medical and industrial devices. However, he also points out the flip side of the coin: certification. Virtualization can help provide strong separation on multicore, which makes certification manageable (the article goes into more depth).

Jens also touches on tooling for multicore development, an often-overlooked and under appreciated aspect. A single development environment that can be used to develop the entire device (real-time, UI, kernels, userland) as well as drive testing and debugging is a must to create highly efficient development teams.

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Wi-Fi Direct Permeating Personal Area Networking

By Nikhil Chauhan

Did you hear it?

Wi-Fi Alliance launches a specification called Wi-Fi Direct that allows WLAN (Wireless LAN) devices to connect directly without an Access Point in between. Well, well, this appears to be a war of worlds between the WLAN and Bluetooth camps because this surely will fit the use cases of Bluetooth users. Does this also mean the end of WLAN Access Points (AP)? That's yet to be seen.

802.11 WLAN technology, as you might be aware of, offers two types of WLANs: 'Ad Hoc' and 'Infrastructure'. The 'Ad Hoc', termed as IBSS (Independent Basic Service Set), allows two WLAN stations to talk to each other directly. In other words, this is technology that exists today. So, what's the new hoopla around Wi-Fi Direct.

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Talk Between Devices

By Nikhil Chauhan

Ever wondered what it would be like without access to ever increasing means of connection?

Thanks to social networking sites that I am now in touch with my friends who used to exchange bicycles while riding to my fifth grade class.

In the past decade or so, we have come a long way. The social norms have been re-defined with applications such as social networking, M-commerce, E-Commerce, virtual world, remote health monitoring, E-readers, media streaming and storage, etc. All of these are resulting in an explosion in global internet traffic. Cisco forecasts that the annual global IP traffic will reach half a zettabyte in 2012.

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Virtually... Not Yours

By Mike Deliman

So with all this virtualization going on, one computer can run multiple copies of an OS (or multiple OSs), all acting like they own the whole computer. With only some fancy shim layer keeping them from corrupting themselves and everything else, what are the implications for security?  Security is an issue that has been raised more frequently as computers have become more powerful and the network more pervasive.  I mean, viruses spread fast enough when the World Wide Web was mostly single computers with modems dialing up to servers.  In this day of broadband everywhere and constant connections,  doesn't virtualization present a special problem? Doesn't a machine running 10 virtual servers just mean that a virus gets to invade 10 servers for the price of entering one machine? Let the SPAM flow!  NOT!

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Smartphones, Smartbooks different by necessity?

By Doug Schaefer

Boy I'm having fun with Android. Maybe because it's the first time I'm getting the chance (albeit in my spare time) to do some real embedded development. And even in the playing I'm doing, I am experiencing the challenges that regular embedded developers face. Yes, believe or not, even with the latest and greatest hardware, you are limited by the amount of memory and storage your device has, and by the speed and capabilities of the processor. Not to mention power (feel like running your graphics loop at full speed, see how long your battery lasts doing that). You really have to think about these things and write your code carefully to be successful. (And I won't get started on Java again).

One thing you still see in the rumoursphere with Android is the spreading of it's wings into the "smartbook" world. I love that term, Smartbook. Mobile Internet Device is too vague and I think there is a clear delineation between the tree contenders: smartphone, startbook, netbook. Smartphones are the small handheld things we know and love today. Netbooks are the small notebooks which likely have a hard drive in them. But Smartbooks are an exciting middle ground between the two. They have usable screens, 5-9 inches, but everything else is like a smartphone, particularly in mobility and power consumption. A good smartbook should last the day without charging making it handy for carrying around conferences like EclipseCon, for example :).

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Tolerating Delays

By Mike Deliman

This may sound a bit funny, but in the space industry, we're constantly playing catch-up.  We're either looking at or for things that happened millions or hundreds of millions of years ago, sending rockets off to get to where something will have been just in time to take a picture of or bore a hole into it, or designing new rockets for flight 5 years from now with computer bits that would have been considered top-of-the-line 5 or 10 years ago.  When we're recovering data and sending commands from and to deep space probes, we point our antennae to where the probe is supposed to be 30 minutes from now and start sending our data now; the idea is by the time the data actually gets there the craft will be where it was expected and receive the commands, and send it's data back to us.

This process I just described - of anticipating where a craft is, transmitting before it's there - and it transmitting back - is pretty much how the Deep Space network is currently used.  It takes huge amounts of planning, all done in advance, to set up the multiple sessions that allow one successful exchange like that to work out.  People consult tables of times when craft will be "visible", consult tables of one-way light distances to find transmission times.  When they think they know when they need time, and how much data they expect to exchange (how much  time they need),  they contact the folks who run the big antennas.  if the time slot is available, arrangements are made, and that one set of transmissions can take place.  The folks who run the Deep Space Network and their customers do this sort of thing all the time - it's how they try to make the most efficient use of their giant antennae.

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The Internet Will Be Paid…

By Doug Gaff

Or so some guy named Barry Diller says. I beg to differ.

Unless you've been living in a cave for a while, you've noticed that there's an ideological war underway around content. By content, I mean software, music, tv programs, movies, books, and any other piece of information or entertainment you can package. The war is between paid and free, closed and open, restricted and unrestricted. Did this war start with open source software? I'm not sure, but open source has definitely helped arm the conflict. Let's consider the content categories.

When you look for a software application or you need to perform a task with software, you can almost always find free software to do just about anything. In many instances, the free stuff is nowhere near as good as its commercial counterpart (e.g. GIMP vs. Photoshop). This reality keeps us software types employed for now. But the free stuff is still there, and sometimes it's good enough.

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Multicore and Unicore Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

Sometimes I get a chance to browse the web a bit, trying to find interesting tidbits. I ran into the following post from Hollis Blanchard. Hollis is an active participant in the world of virtualization, particularly on the Power architecture.

Hollis makes a point that I have been trying to get out as well: virtualization is clearly technology to look into when you are building multicore systems, but also when you are building unicore systems.

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Security In An Insecure World

By Mike Deliman

Diebold has apparently gaffe'd their software again.  Their ATM systems run software based on Windows.  This gives me a perfect opportunity.  Recently some of my friends heard me talking about our MILS software starting under it's evaluation path.  I heard a question being asked more and more about government programs and practices, "okay, but what good does this do for me?"  In the article mentioned above we have an excellent example of where MILS could benefit the average person every day:

But Yerrapragada told SCMagazineUS.com that machines need run-time control software to ensure nothing can tamper with authorized applications. "You could have firewalls and hardening, but... if those things are not patched, you are out of luck," he said.

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POWERVR goes MP

By Doug Schaefer

I was just reading up on the news that Imagination Technologies has launched a new generation of their architecture that drives POWERVR. What's POWERVR, you ask? It's a good question, but chances are, if you have a mobile device that has 3D accelerated graphics, it's driven by this hugely popular silicon IP.

The big news is that even they're going multi-core to achieve scalable graphics. They claim they rival the performance of discrete graphics chipsets, which I assume means the nVidias and ATI's of the world. That's a pretty interesting combination when you look at the latest chips that have multi-core ARM processors combined with DSPs (digital signal processors) for audio/video processing, which can then be combined with these powerful 3D cores.

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TV's are small, plus a little Clutter

By Doug Schaefer

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 :( ).

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