Wind River Blog Network

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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Workbench and Jazz

By Emeka Nwafor

Today I managed to carve out some quality hands-on time to play with Wind River Workbench integrated with Rational Team Concert - also known as Jazz. While playing with this development environment, I found myself wishing that "I had these types of development tools back when I was doing embedded development environment".

If you are not familiar with Rational Team Concert (RTC), think of it as a collaborative development platform that unifies planning, tracking, automation of software development processes, team collaboration, work item management, and reporting (think dashboards) with traceability across all artifacts that participate in software delivery processes. By artifacts, I mean things like source code, builds, defects, requirements, log files, change sets, etc... In short, RTC is all about connecting team members.

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What’s New in Wind River Test Management 3.3?

By Paul Henderson

Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.

Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.

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What Exactly are You Testing, and How?

By Emeka Nwafor

"What exactly are you testing? How are you testing it?"

I'm sure that these are amongst the questions that product, business, and technical managers across the embedded software industry have asked themselves on several occasions throughout their careers. I know I have.

The importance of testing embedded software isn't new. In my "youth", I remember our VP of Product Development circulating a white paper that discussed the devastating impact resulting from the deployment of an untested "simple" patch to some switching software and declaring that "this cannot happen to us".

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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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What would the IDE look like if invented today?

By Doug Schaefer

I just finished reading a great analysis of Google Wave by Redmonk's Stephen O'Grady. Ever since seeing him present at an Eclipse board/council meeting, I've been following his blog. Highly recommended if you're interested in a great perspective on what's really happening in the enterprise open source world.

As I was reading it, I was struck by what Lars Rasmussen said at the beginning of his keynote on Wave at the Google IO conference: "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?". Well, apparently they've ended up with an open, extensible framework for hosted collaboration systems that seemlessly merge IM, e-mail, and documents into a single interactive workflow. Wave has really impressed me as a significant step in the evolution in the way we communicate on the web.

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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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Fighting for Mobile Mindshare

By Doug Schaefer

The more I look into what's happening in the mobile scene, the more excited I get. The smartphone platforms really are the computers of tomorrow. They all have big (enough) screens with touch, most of them have keyboards, connectivity is excellent with both wifi and high speed 3G (Rogers in Canada says it has 3.5G, even better). Heck, they're way more powerful than the PCs we fell in love with in the 80s.

I'm looking at this from an application developer's point of view. If you're a mobile app developer and you have a great idea, what platform do you target? And it's a pretty significant choice, just like it was in the 80's. All of the platforms have not only different APIs, but different programming languages. iPhone with Objective-C, Android with it's own version of Java, Palm Pre with JavaScript, RIM with J2ME, and Nokia with almost everything including Flash and C++. And then you have the Linux-based MIDs such as Moblin (need to mention my upcoming new bosses :)) and Maemo which are also starting to blur the line as they start acquiring 3G functionality. In theory, you'd love to get your idea on all these platforms.

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Creating the Next Generation of Technology Leaders

By Warren Kurisu

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) just kicked off the 2009 FIRST Robotics Championship in Atlanta Georgia.  If you aren’t aware of what the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is, check out this cool video.  I first became aware of FRC when I was visiting a key customer and partner, National Instruments, who asked me if Wind River would be interested in partnering with them to sponsor the 2009 FRC.  Since this would consume time and energy and there was no direct business attached to the event, I was initially dubious.  But once I understood the positive impact of a “yes” decision, the decision was easy.

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Fun with Qemu/Qt

By Doug Schaefer

Just for fun (and maybe profit), I thought I'd try and get Qt running on the mini ARM Linux setup that I used for my tutorial at EclipseCon. Low and behold, all I had to do was build it with the compiler I got from CodeSourcery for ARM and it worked!

Now there isn't a whole lot of magic here. It's using the Linux framebuffer device that draws to the screen. I'm not sure how it would look on a real device but it looked might fine on qemu. Here's a snapshot of it running on my laptop, which is now solidly Fedora. It's running the browser demo app and has loaded my blog just before I posted this. It took a little while to load and render, but again, it looked pretty good.

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WolfenQt: Proof in pudding

By Doug Schaefer

An update to my previous post. As proof I got it working, here's my blog from earlier today. You can't see the flash since apparently the adobe flash player bypasses the widget set and opens a native window directly. Wonder where it showed up... At any rate, lots of fun. And with OpenGL mode turned on, performs quite nicely and the widgets are quite readable.

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Widgets in 3D: WolfenQt

By Doug Schaefer

As the shiny balls spin around in my world, Qt has jumped back into the foreground. My Fedora laptop is busy building 4.5 as I write this and slowly catching on fire (man these things get hot when they're busy working). While that was going on, I took another look at how you'd implement Qt widgets in 3D space, kind of like Clutter does in a GTK fashion (mind you I think those are just static 2D images, not widgets).

Low and behold, I came across the Qt Lab Blog entry by someone there who actually has a demo of Qt widgets running in a maze similar to the old id games. He called it WolfenQt. Take a look here:

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Putting on my Fedora

By Doug Schaefer

Well, I did it, I finally did it. I ordered a 320GB drive and set up a dual boot situation with my old Windows install and my spanking brand new Fedora 10 on the rest of the disk. So far so good. It wasn't a perfect process, including a 4 hour shrink of my NTFS partition. But I'm up and running. And I have an out to go back if things go bad, but I have a feeling I won't.

I have a Dell D830 and had to install the Broadcom wireless driver and the nVidia driver for my NVS 140M graphics chip. Now, since these aren't under open source licenses, you have to get them from other sources, in my case rpmfusion.org. This is part of what sets Fedora apart from Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, it's a lot easier to set this up. You know you can mix GPL and !GPL and it's OK ;). At any rate, I deal with it since I feel Fedora is a bit crisper, especially for those of us who think they know what they're doing.

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March 2009 Eclipse Board Meeting

By Doug Gaff

While most EclipseCon attendees were enjoying the excellent tutorials or participating in the annual Members Meeting, the Eclipse Board was quietly having our quarterly face to face board meeting. As usual, here is a brief summary of our meeting.

Elections.
We said goodbye to elected Board Members stepping down at the end of their terms: Robert Day, Mik Kersten, Jeff McAffer, Emma McGrattan and Tracy Ragan. The committer reps would especially like to recognize our fellow reps, Mik and Jeff. Jeff has been on the Board for several years and has contributed extensively to the direction of Eclipse, both in his project leadership and participation and at the Board level. I have personally worked with Mik over the past year on committer issues, and he is a strong community advocate, in addition to leading one of the coolest projects at Eclipse, Mylyn. To this year's re-elected Committer Reps, Chris Aniszczyk, myself (Doug Gaff) and Ed Merks, we welcome newly-elected Boris Bokowski to our ranks. Boris has a long history with Eclipse and will serve the committer population well.

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EclipseCon 2009 and git

By Doug Gaff

As in past years, EclipseCon 2009 was fun, interesting, and exhausting. Thanks to Darin for organizing 4 days of early morning 3-5 mile runs to offset the food and beer!

I'm pleased to have made the top 10 tweeters for EclipseCon. Unfortunately, my friends on facebook (a) know without a doubt I'm still a geek and (b) do not know what the hell I do for a living. I think perhaps the twitter app in facebook is a bad idea….different community, different friends, different etiquette.

A quick summary of the conference. I owe the committers my notes from the Board Meeting on Monday and a hearty "thanks!" for re-electing me to the Board for a second term. I remain obligated to do your bidding for another year.

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EclipseCon notes and git

By Doug Schaefer

Well, I'm back at my day job at Wind and am doing a little reflection on what happened last week at EclipseCon. Despite the rumored lower attendence, I met with pretty much as many people as I do every year, maybe even slightly more. And hopefully that'll translate into growth in the CDT community.

And I guess my talk on building communities was a little over the top on the subject of project "takers" that I had a number of people come up to me and apologize and offer to contribute in the future. I certainly didn't mean to offend or criticize. I just wanted to prepare project contributors that there are vendors and people who are happy to take your work for free and not give anything back. And, while that's frustrating, with open source licensing there's nothing you can really do about it but be mentally prepared to see it happen.

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IDE in the Cloud

By Doug Schaefer

There's been a lot of talk at EclipseCon here about the "IDE in the Cloud". I missed it but apparently the Mozilla Bespin demo at the e4 talk was quite impressive. It is easy to set up, and it's pretty fast as a code editor. I guess that makes sense since browsers have been heavily optimized for fast display of textual and graphical content. So I have to admit, it's led me to reconsider this technology. Rational tried this many years ago, remember Catapulse?, to build hosted development environments. The idea, and the company, collapsed in the high-tech bust of 2001. Maybe they were just too early.

But as we start to rely on the cloud, what happens when the sky's are clear? I just heard Kevin McGuire say that, hey, my e-mail is on the server, why shouldn't my code be there too. I use Outlook and Thunderbird in a mode that downloads my e-mail to my machine so I can access it disconnected. I don't always have access to the cloud. Until the cloud is omni-present, through things like metropolitan wireless schemes, and cheep, $10/day at my hotel wasn't cheep, then I don't see it really taking off as the typical way you do software development.

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CDT Code Introspection APIs

By Doug Schaefer

I'm just sitting in Markus's talk on the APIs the CDT provides to create code models, ASTs, the Indexer and ways of getting information out of there. These facilities are used to implement features such as content assist and open declaration and searching, etc. And you can use it too for all your static analysis needs. A copy of his presentation is available from the EclipseCon site by following the link to gPublication. It's a great reference on how to get started.

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Slides from my Talk on the CDT Community

By Doug Schaefer

I'm not sure why the EclipseCon submission system isn't accepting this but here are the slides from my talk on the Rise and Fall and Rise of the CDT, Lessons on Building Communities. I had a lot of fun creating and presenting this talk. I guess it's a passion of mine and people seemed to like it. The slides have few words on it and I'd be happy to give more details if you have any questions.

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A Great EclipseCon Already

By Doug Schaefer

I've been here at EclipseCon for 48 hours and it's been great already. I've met a lot of people here, like I always do, and it's a good sign that vendors still see Eclipse as important, enough to spend the money in these tough times to send their technical experts.

EclipseCon is an important conference, especially for those who are looking to get started with Eclipse and to grow their expertise. There's probably not enough time to learn it all, but at least you know where to go look when you get home.

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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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Should Wascana get Qt?

By Doug Schaefer

I've been working on my EclipseCon talk and tutorial, which I'm really looking forward to now. Especially the talk where I hope to share some of the things I learned being involved with the CDT project for almost seven years now. And I'm hopeful it's useful to others working in open source, especially the things that didn't work as well as I hoped...

Anyway, while doing that, I've started playing with Qt, which was recently released with LGPL as one of the choices for licensing. That eliminates one of the hurdles I have for including it into Wascana, my CDT for Windows distribution. So now the question is, should I include it? Should I also keep wxWidgets? Since the Wascana plan is to become a p2-based distribution, there should be no harm in having both. It's just that I don't use wxWidgets so I'm not sure whether what I'm producing works or not.

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Version Control at EclipseCon

By Doug Gaff

Following up on my previous post, we have organized an excellent group of panelist for our EclipseCon panel: Controlled Chaos – Version control in the Twenty-first Century. We'll be in the Theater on Tuesday at 2:30, and we'll be using twitter for questions with the hash: #eclipsecon-vc.

If you can't get enough of Version Control, check out the VCS BoF on Tuesday night and the git BoF on Wednesday night. See you there!

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Qemu 0.10.0 now available

By Doug Schaefer

In a message from Anthony Liguori to the qemu-devel mailing list, "The QEMU team is pleased to announce the availability of the 0.10.0 release. This release has been a year in the making and is the result of almost 3,000 changesets from around 80 developers." The release was quickly put together in the last few days (i.e. in Eclipse terms, there wasn't much of a ramp down). And the resulting build is actually pretty hard to find, at least until it gets propagated to all the mirrors, but it's a milestone anyway.

There's a pretty long list of new targets and hardware emulation. There's also improvements to the VNC support. The biggest news is the new code generator for translating op codes into runnable code. It's called TCG (Tiny Code Generator according to Wikipedia) and removes the dependency qemu had on gcc 3.x, which means it gets to take advantage of the huge performance improvements of gcc 4.x. I think I read somewhere that the Android qemu was running 1.5 times faster thanks to that. And my copy is humming using the gcc 4 I'm integrating into the future Wascana 1.0.

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Way too much fun with qemu

By Doug Schaefer

As I've been blogging about lately, I'm getting ready for my EclipseCon tutorial which will walk the attendees through adding support for a cross-compile environment to the CDT. The target of this environment will be qemu running a tiny Linux platform which includes the latest release kernel, busybox, dropbear with sftp-server from OpenSSH, using the free glibc C run-time and gcc cross compile tools from CodeSourcery.

I'm using the default ARM target for the latest qemu which unfortunately has a bug in the FIFO emulation that interfaces with the emulated SecureDigital card where I want my root file system. I asked on the qemu-devel list and someone there sent me a patch they had posted a couple of weeks ago. Checking out the qemu source from svn into the CDT, I was able to fix up the function where this was done and I was quickly up and running with my root file system on the SD card image. Very, very cool!

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Subversive vs. Subclipse

By Doug Schaefer

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.

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CDT 6.0 M5 is Available, BTW

By Doug Schaefer

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:

http://download.eclipse.org/tools/cdt/releases/galileo

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.

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Eclipse in the Clouds?

By Doug Schaefer

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.

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Beagle Board and Eclipse Distros

By Doug Schaefer

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.

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Happy Birthday, Eclipse!

By Hans Juergen Rauscher

Five years ago, on February 2nd, 2004 the Eclipse Board of Stewards announced Eclipse's reorganization into a not-for-profit corporation.

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.

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