Wind River Blog Network

ESC Silicon Valley

By Mark Hermeling

Looking forward to my trip to ESC Sillicon Valley next week. It is promising to be a busy show, especially since ESC is now combined with the Multicore expo. I just leafed through the agenda (in the form of a Nxtbook) and found a large number of sessions that I want to attend, experience show though that I'll probably be too busy talking to customer to attend sessions, which is a good problem to have of course.

I am hosting a 4 hour session (with several of my colleagues) on Multicore Demystified on Tuesday afternoon 2.30-7pm (there will be refresments!) in the Hilton Plaza Room. Do stop by either the session, or our booth at Multicore Expo for a chat if you want to brain storm about your next generation devices.

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Quit Bugging Me: Making Maps

By Mike Deliman

A tool commonly used in embedded debugging is a linker map - a map of where all the symbols are in the runtime image.  These maps are useful as they turn raw addresses reported by some exception stubs (etc) into offsets into the data or text (program routines) in the computer's RAM.  They give you an idea of what may have been happening when the error occurred.

Producing a linker map is fairly easy.  Most linkers include command line options to produce a map.  This works fine and is very clear when used from a command line.  But things can get a little confusing from within an integrated gui environment.

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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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Get Real, Go Virtual

By Michel Genard

I am going to make a bold statement: Go virtual to create reality. Seems crazy enough?

According to Wikipedia, reality means "the state of things as they actually exist.” The concept of existence can be elusive, because to exist, something doesn’t need to be real; it just needs to have its own relevance. Often we humans use simplified terms to explain complex concepts or situations and we describe phenomena in mathematical equations. We do it all the time in many domains such as philosophy, physics, nuclear, and chemistry, and it works.

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Bringing Home the Science Bacon

By Mike Deliman

MRO recently passed a milestone of bringing back more data than all previous deep space missions combined.  To do this MRO was equipped with a large dish antenna and powerful radio, and is running a more powerful computer than it's companions on and orbiting Mars.  It gets a fair share of antenna time from the DSN antennae on the ground.

Science means collecting data, processing it for it's information, and analyzing the information.  All of these activities can be greatly facilitated by some degree of computer assistance. When it comes to remote-operated scientists (rovers, gliders, orbiters, diggers, swimmers, crawlers, hover-ers..) the computer has to do all the work.

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Bit Rot Amnesia

By Mike Deliman

Spirit Rover has been having a number of problems recently, anomalous behaviors, losing contact with Earth, even forgetting commands.  Amnesia has been one of the larger concerns.

At the heart of this issue is a bank of flash memory.  Flash pretty much works by saturating cells to "1"s, then writing the cells that need to be 0's.  "quantum wells" hold the charge for later recall.  Since this is all done with minute electrical charges, one would have to wonder how long it could last.

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Virtually Yours...

By Mike Deliman

This morning we've made a couple of announcements that will hopefully surprise and delight the Real Time computing community.  Wind River is releasing two new products that have their base in  virtualization: Wind River's Hypervisor, and Wind River's MILS 2.0.  Both of these products introduce platform virtualization, used in different ways.   Wind River's implementations allow for a "flotilla" of OS's" to be run amongst a "sea of Cores" - it can be run as a one-to-many, many-to-many, or many-to one configuration (that is with SMP, one OS can be run by many cores, the Hypervisor is capable of running / scheduling many OS's among many cores, and both the Hypervisor and MILS 2.0 are capable of running many OS's over one shared core).

Both of these products are very high-powered and sophisticated.  Both products are designed with an eye to the future.  The Hypervisor itself can be used in SMP, AMP, Supervised-AMP and cooperative multicore configurations, and can also be configured to paravirtualize several Operating Systems and run them all (time-share style) on a single core.  The MILS 2.0 product is designed specifically to paravirtualize OS's and run them on a single shared-core with a high degree of separation maintained by the MILS 2.0 separation kernel.

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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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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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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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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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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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I love OCD

By Doug Gaff

No, I’m not talking about locking the front door exactly 3 times before going to bed or using a new bar of soap each time I wash my hands à la Jack Nicholson. I’m talking about On-Chip Debugging – using JTAG tools for device software debugging.

I got my start at Wind River working on JTAG-based debuggers. A couple of years ago, my team integrated Wind River’s JTAG emulators into our Eclipse-based product, Wind River Workbench. It was quite a challenge connecting hardware debugging to a debugging framework focused on application development, and the Device Debugging and Target Management projects spun out of that effort.

Today I manage our Eclipse open source contributions, but I still sit next to my OCD buddies. When they’re not nervously clicking their retractable pens, they’re writing firmware for our JTAG emulators. Today, they released a cool new emulator that blows away their previous products:

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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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What's in a Kernel?

By Mike Deliman

Recently my cohorts Paul Parkinson and Doug Gaff have been making a bit of noise about changes in the software industry - evolution of software, and specialized software for military and commercial avionics,and other applications that have strict time and security requirements.  Aside from requiring strict adherence to standards, critical systems software - especially medical or flight related - have an increasing litany of certification inspections it must pass.  In the secure-systems markets the same trend is evident. Each of these markets are starting to require time- and space- critical systems.

Let me define time and space critical.

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Test as you... surprise!

By Mike Deliman

There's an old adage in the world of flight - space flight, or otherwise.

"Test as you fly, fly as you test."

It's pretty short and sweet and straight-forward.  Don't fly what you haven't tested.  Test exactly the ways you expect to fly.

In a big, round, wonderful world, it seems "funny" when we hear about problems related to living here.  Problems like aircraft "flipping over" when they crossed the equator because they were adjusting to negative latitude - the coder hadn't thought far enough ahead to think about crossing the equator.

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Eclipse is Who?

By Doug Gaff

I don’t want to beat a dead horse on the “Eclipse is You” thread (Bjorn, Doug, Steve, Eugene, Doug, Ian, Dennis, Bjorn, John), but I figured everyone else is tired of talking about it, so I might get the last word!

Those of us running projects in Eclipse are faced with the common scenario Doug pointed out: people want you to do things, and they often don’t or simply can’t help with the work. In the Eclipse development process, we sometimes refer to these people as (with tongue firmly planted in cheek) the “User Community.” They are valuable because they help prove your technology without the same expectations and costs associated with a paying customer…or so we sometimes wish.

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Manageable Devices

By Maarten Koning

The more we rely on intelligent devices in our lives, the more they need to be easily managed. It just doesn't scale for us to look at the LCD panel of dozens of devices in our homes just to see if they are all still working properly. Who has time to do that once a week let alone once a day? And if my thermostat decides that the furnace isn't doing what its been told, I'd like to know before the aquarium freezes solid. The devices we rely on need to be manageable - and connected.

Enterprise and carrier networking products are  devices we rely on that have been doing remote software management,  diagnostics and control for decades. They call it OA&M for Operations, Administration and Maintenance. My PVR already has some remote OA&M capabilities and I know it is occasionally upgraded by someone who is definitely not in my house - I like that.

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