Wind River Blog Network

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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Windows 7

By Doug Gaff

The blogosphere is all atwitter about Windows 7. (Sorry…bad mixture of metaphors.) I must confess that I've installed it, but not on a mission-critical system. For a "Ballmer Beta" (TM Doug Gaff), I'm surprised at how well it works. Truthfully, it feels like a very nice Service Pack for Vista, which I think is the intention. Unfortunately I'm sure I'll still have to pay for it when it's released. Attention Microsoft: how about a "we're sorry about Vista" free upgrade coupon for us early adopters?

Lifehacker has an excellent rundown of Windows 7 features, and their coverage is on-going. Of particular interest is a very technical presentation from Mark Russinovich, father of the awesome sysinternals tools. Mark's presentation covers some of the intricacies of the Win 7 kernel, including multi-core scalability (256 cores), startup time optimizations and tricks, legacy app compatibility, Vista driver compatibility, MinWin, and virtualization. Clocking in at 45 minutes, this is a time commitment, but it's geek worthy.

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E6500 Part II & Cutting the Cord

By Doug Gaff

Update on my E6500 post. Things are improving in the driver department. Since that post, Dell has released new apps/drivers for: Sound, DCP, Fingerprint Reader, Embassy, and the Webcam. I'm no longer having most of the problems I reported, except suspend is still flaky when the mobile broadband card is enabled, and DCP still really sucks. As soon as I figure out how to run the mobile broadband card without DCP, I'm uninstalling that app. Many thanks for the numerous helpful comments and the commiseration.

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Twitter vs. Facebook

By Doug Gaff

I'm looking for some advice on microblogging etiquette and usage. I have both twitter and facebook accounts, but I haven't figured out when I should use twitter vs. facebook status/news feed.

For a while, I had twitter and facebook connected via the facebook twitter app. This app allows your tweets to automatically update your facebook status. It's interesting, but it's one-directional. Updating my facebook status directly doesn't produce a tweet, and tweets from others don't show up in my facebook news feed.

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Tech Support for Geeks

By Doug Gaff

Over the holiday break, I waited on the phone 30 minutes to hear a tech support person sing Celine Dion in my ear while telling me to reset my cable modem.

Ok, let me back up a bit.

I switched to a new Cable/Phone/Internet provider last week. You know the drill – the promotional period expires on your current plan and your monthly bill goes up 30%. Fortunately, there are two Cable providers (Comcast and RCN) in my town, and Verizon FiOS is coming this year. Hooray for competition, although would it kill these companies to just make the promotional price the regular price and keep me as a customer? Oops my bad. I forgot that Capitalism = bilking money from as many customers as possible for as long as possible.

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Zune 30, Killed by Complexity

By Doug Schaefer

I first heard of it early New Years Eve, I guess. Hoards of Microsoft Zunes were committing mass suicide (a gruesome thought but the actual quote from the Slashdot article). Fears rose that some Y2K thing was happening, mind you things like that didn't happen in Y2K, at least not on this scale. Microsoft finally confirmed the issue as such though, a device driver hang on the 366'th day of a leap year. I'd love to see that code...

Well, thanks to the wonders of the internet, here it is! (I imagine this link will fall dead as soon as the Microsoft cronies make the rounds, as they should. It does have a Microsoft copyright). I actually found it through another blog where the guy put together a pretty good analysis of the problem.

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Fun with my little VIA console

By Doug Schaefer

At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose this year they handed out little VIA embedded EPIA systems to the attendees. I'm not sure everyone got one, but I was thrilled. It has a embedded VIA processor with a chipset that includes Unichrome 3D graphics, and also include a hard drive, ethernet, VGA, four USB ports, and audio in and out. It's a cool little unit.

I haven't done too much with it, but thinking about this Open Console concept (set top box with 3D graphics running Linux), I thought I'd try setting it up with some of the things I had in mind. I started by putting the Debian lenny installer onto a USB stick and installing from it. That was a little tricky until I reformated my USB stick and put syslinux on it properly. I installed enough packages to get X running with the openchrome driver for 3D graphics. glxgears ran pretty smoothly which gave me some hope I could actually use this thing to run games.

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Dell E6500 – good hardware, but lots of software problems

By Doug Gaff

I recently found myself in the market for a new home computer. I have a D820 at work, which has been working fine for a while now that I'm past the Vista pre-SP1 headaches, so I decided to look at the new Dell Latitude E series. The E series is the next generation business line, and the hardware specs on the E6500 I ended up buying are excellent: Core2 Duo T9600 2.8GHz, WUXGA screen, 250G hard drive will free fall sensor, 4G RAM, and lots of goodies that are part of the base platform. Additionally, Dell has completely redesigned the packaging of their Latitude line, and it's much more solid and streamlined that past versions.

A laptop is only as good as how well it travels, so I decided to take the E6500 on a business trip to Europe last week (Eclipse Summit Europe for those following on the Planet). I only put the basics on the laptop before my trip, because I wanted to prove out the system before loading it down. Sadly, even with only the basics installed, I had a ton of problems that all point to unstable drivers and some lousy software from Dell.

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Why a good platform can't be free

By Doug Schaefer

I sure am having fun thinking about OpenConsole, i.e., a Linux based set top box that plays in the same space as Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, but is really an evolution of the Home Theater PC (HTPC) into gaming, but all using open licensing so you don't have to pay the big boys to write applications for this platform. The underlying technologies are pretty cool as I play with adding OpenGL graphics to the qemu emulator. But the business side of it is interesting as well.

In particular, my thoughts turned to multimedia support on open platforms. This is where the insistence on Linux being free is really biting the hand that feeds you. Not all good software can be free. We do live in a world of patents and a lot of the key technology that goes into a multimedia system is protected by patents and require a license to legally distribution implementations of that technology.

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BMW wants to go open

By Doug Schaefer

Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.

The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.

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Open Console you say

By Doug Schaefer

Linux powers "cloud" gaming console.

More info here.

I hate the term cloud, but this is close to the internet appliance/open gaming console I have been thinking about. Specs are damn close too. Although I'm not sure the ATI HD 3200 class graphics (I assume it's the 780G chipset) will do a good job at the games. But it's good to see someone with money came up with a similar idea and has made this concept a reality, or at least is marketing it.

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Another legend has eyes on the future

By Doug Schaefer

I just finished reading an interview with another legend of the game programming industry, Epic's Tim Sweeney (Mr. Unreal). First it was John Carmack from id (Mr. Doom) wondering how game developers will be able to harness multi-core technologies to improve game performance. Now I see Tim has a very interesting vision for how these technologies are going to change the industry.

It looks like both of them agree, multi-core general purpose processors will make graphics specific processing units obsolete, at least the fixed function parts of those graphics processors. But Tim seems to have a grasp of what that environment will look like. And it's both exciting and liberating.

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Time ripe for a Linux console?

By Doug Schaefer

I was watching my son the other day on our XBOX 360 that's tucked nicely in our cabinet under the TV with our DVD player, digital cable box, and receiver. He was playing Halo 3, which looks great on our LCD HDTV, BTW. He'd break out once in a while and go back to the Dashboard and send a text message to a buddy then go back into the game and use the headset connected to his controller to talk about his school day with another buddy he was shooting at. It's incredible how far consoles have come from the old Atari boxes we had when we were kids. Now they're these multi-processing entertainment centers and communication devices that hook our kids up to the rest of the world.

It's also interesting how he's migrated away from our PC over to the XBOX. That could be because our PC is getting old and the 360 is actually a more powerful machine. But, still there are still things you can't do on it.

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Open Source Handhelds

By Doug Schaefer

Quite a while ago now I posted about the open source gaming device from Korea know as the GP2X. At the end of the day, it ended up with a storied history and while I love the concept of a handheld mobile device for which you can write your own applications, their execution as a company out side of Korea wasn't that great and only a distributor in the UK was able to make any kind of splash with it.

At any rate, I found on Slashdot that they have announced a new generation of the product called the Wiz. The links lead you to the UK site and a big JPEG of the brochure in English. The specs look pretty good, ARM9 processor at 533MHz, 3D accelerated graphics, Linux of course, and support for audio and video making it a pretty cool multimedia gaming machine, for which you can write your own applications. And hopefully they'll be a bit more successful at delivering it than the last one.

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Wind River Webinar: Q and A

By Mike Deliman

Hello All,

last week as some of you know I was the featured presenter / presentation for a Webinar. (you may have problems watching that with firefox...) .  During the course of the webinar, we were asked a number of questions, and we ran out of time...

Here are some of the questions and answers we couldn't get to.

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Who's leading anyway?

By Doug Schaefer

The LinuxHater linked off to Christopher Blizzard's (from OLPC fame and now at Mozilla) blog on the current state of affairs with the GNOME project. He gives some very eye opening insight into what's happening there and the potential future directions for GNOME, GTK, and friends. It's not pretty, literally.

GNOME is getting big in the mobile space, or at least the number of contributors from that space is starting to dominate the GNOME project. And as we all know in the open source world, the contributors are the leaders and get to make the decisions. What this likely means and what blizzard is afraid of is that the GNOME desktop is not going to get the attention it needs to compete with the modern interfaces it competes with. The commercial interest just isn't there to make it happen like it is with GNOME mobile.

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Is Vista another ME?

By Doug Gaff

I have an ongoing lunchtime discussion with some of my coworkers about Vista. We've covered the usual topics: the hardware requirements, the OS footprint, the driver challenges, comparisons to Ubuntu and Mac, etc. Lately we've been drawing parallels between Vista and Windows ME.

Windows ME (Millennium Edition), as you old timers will recall, was the last version of Windows on the 9x kernel (Windows 95, Windows 98). Microsoft had already released Windows 2000, based on the NT kernel, and Windows XP came less than a year after ME's release – supposedly unifying 2000 and ME (NT kernel + nice UI).

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Bye Bill. You will be missed

By Doug Schaefer

Reading the news I see that today was Bill Gates last day at Microsoft. Apparently, they held a tearful farewell in Redmond for him. And it really does mark a significant moment in the history of our industry and a time to reflect.

If I had a dime for every time I read someone say that Bill Gates crashed their machine or was someone personally affecting their life in some negative way, I'd be as rich as he is (well, maybe not). But as much as you may hate Microsoft and the methods they've used to drive their vision, you have to take a good look at what Bill Gates and company have done and how they've succeeded.

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Mobile phones clear for take-off?

By Paul Parkinson

A few months ago I commented on some of the technical developments in passenger in-flight systems ('In-flight Internet access...and mobile phones too?'). In recent weeks, there have been some rapid developments, not on the technical front, but in terms of regulation and operation, with announcements from the UK telecommunications regulator Ofcom and the European Commission.

On the 26th March, Ofcom published the results of its consultation on the use of Mobile Communications on Aircraft (MCA). The executive summary summarizes the findings and Ofcom's decisions, but the full statement (PDF) provides much more detail, revealing a mixture of social, operational, safety and security issues.

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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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Hacking Time & Linux Appliances

By Doug Gaff

One of the curses of being an Engineer is that we have the knack for hacking things, not just computers, but pretty much anything around the house, garage, or office. It's a curse because none of the products we buy ever work quite the way we want them to. If only my cordless phone had this one extra button. Why did they build the closet organizer that way? If I take out this wall, move these stairs, and raise the ceiling… Well, you get the idea. I often envy people who just buy a house, car, or piece of technology and use it as is. They must have a lot more free time.

Lately, I've found myself hacking my D-Link DNS-323 NAS box. This appliance is an empty two drive bay with a Gig-E port. You buy it and two of your favorite SATA drives, open the cover and slide the drives in, and then go through a simple web setup…instant NAS with RAID. If I was a normal person, I would leave it alone at this point because it works perfectly without any modifications. But this is really a geek toy in disguise. It runs Linux, and if you put a script with the correct name on one of the drives, the appliance executes that script at startup. There's an entire DNS-323 wiki dedicated to turning it into whatever you want to make it. You can even mod the hardware to get access to the JTAG pins and the serial port. So far, I've only enabled the command line and SFTP, but I'm really tempted to make a web server, even though I have absolutely no need for one.

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An Industry and Technology Revolution is on the Horizon

By Jason Whitmire

Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. In the Linux world, creating an esoteric, theoretical application standard not based on market-driven code requires too much speculative investment without any clear mitigation of ROI risk for anyone to take up anymore. Indeed, the days of a bunch of representative techies flying to exotic locales to dream up the theoretical perfect system are over. It’s just too expensive to completely retool an entire stack without a known intrinsic return.

Because of the concentration in the mobile market (83% of handsets manufactured by five companies), when market leaders have invested in a stack, it is a standard whether certified by an arcane standards body or not.  The  Open Handset Alliance has created a de facto market standard not because a group of market leaders have adopted the standard, but because of Google’s overall singular market weight. The effect is the same (Trolltech and OpenMoko did the same thing that OHA did, and took it one step further by actually building a phone, but no one came running to embrace their reference designs because they lacked the market weight that Google has).

In-flight Internet access... and mobile phones too?

By Paul Parkinson

I read a business article in the Economist ('Mobile Phones on planes - Your call') during the Christmas holidays about the current developments in passenger in-flight systems, specifically the provision of Internet data access and the potential to support mobile (cell) phone voice calls during flight.

The article reports on trials of a Wi-Fi data service by JetBlue and Quantas, and a forthcoming mobile phone voice call trial by Air France (which follows on from the mobile phone SMS text messaging described in this Air France press release); it then goes on to discuss the social impact and acceptability of Internet data access and mobile voice calls during flight, which makes interesting reading.

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