Wind River Blog Network

CDT at Eclipse Summit Europe

2008-11-20T11:22:08-08:00

By Doug Schaefer

Well, the closing session is about to start and the vendors are packing up their displays. Another successful Eclipse Summit Europe is about to go off into the sunset. For me, it was proof again why I love coming to this show. The CDT community in Europe is strong and a lot of them are doing and want to do interesting things with the CDT.

The talk I gave was on the code analysis capabilities of the CDT introducing the things you can do with the CDT's parsers and indexing framework. I also introduced the new refactoring engine that we have which really opens up a lot of cool automations you can do to analyze and refactor your code. The best part is that I had a few guys come up to me after to ask about certain analysis things they wanted to do. I'm glad I gave that talk and I hope more people take a look at what the CDT has to offer in this area.

Thoughts on Dave Thomas' Keynote

2008-11-20T11:19:24-08:00

By Doug Schaefer

Ed Merks already gave a summary of Dave Thomas' keynote yesterday morning here at Eclipse Summit Europe. It was the first time I saw Dave speak and I was warned he tended to say things that offended the audience. And to Dave's point, that is kind of what a keynote speaker should do. Spark thought. Break through the assumptions that we tend to fall into when we get comfortable in our skin. And I think he raised some serious points that are making me wonder about what's really happening in our industry.

I guess his main point is that Java for embedded has missed the boat. If you haven't gone through the pain of doing Java for embedded devices, don't worry, you didn't miss anything. I've been waiting to see when I need to care about Java in this space and I've talked to some of the people here at Eclipse Summit Europe about this. I think they quietly agree with Dave. Those that have figured out how to do Java on embedded are doing OK with it. But there are a lot of issues to face. The worst of them is the bloat that the Java VM continues to grow from release to release. The embedded VMs are horribly crippled, and if you want to use the Sun VM, you are crippled from paring down that bloat. The discussion is interesting, and we may still be proven wrong, but for now, I can ignore Java for embedded and I can sleep at night.

The Space Flight Software '08 workshop

2008-11-17T09:32:00-08:00

By Mike Deliman

The Space Flight Software '08 workshop in Maryland was really nice. It was a great chance to meet several folks I've worked with over the last few decades, mostly as voices over the phone, and meet some folks new to me and the industry. The theme of the workshop was to share lessons learned and ideas used to make our missions more robust and reliable, more efficient, and reduce cost where possible. The idea is not only to test new technologies and integrate successful ideas with existing work, but to also maximize relevant data return on science objectives.

As might be expected, there was a lot of chatter about space projects, upcoming manned rocket development, recent discoveries in deep space, and success of various recent and ongoing missions. Congratulations to the Phoenix Mars Polar Lander team, by the way, on the successful completion of your mission!

You want to see a busy mailing list?

2008-11-13T21:42:55-08:00

By Doug Schaefer

Just check here: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2008-11/threads.html

I was looking to see when qemu, a very cool virtual machine for many hosts and many target CPU architectures, was going to come out with a new release. As part of that, I was checking to see if it was under active development. Well, with 55 e-mails on November 13'th when I looked, I guess it is :).

Now that's small.

2008-11-12T16:02:50-08:00

By Doug Schaefer

Just ran into this article on LinuxDevices.com. It talks about a tiny computer that looks like this:

That's all there is to it. This ethernet jack has an ARM9 processor in it with 8 MB RAM, 4 MB Flash, and some interfaces that you can hook up electronic devices to. The idea is to add network connectivity to devices that normally don't, like air conditioners and stuff. Apparently there's even a WiFi version of the thing.

Design like you'll be there in 10 years

2008-11-11T14:05:59-08:00

By Doug Schaefer

I probably blogged about this a long time ago. I remember watching the news conference for the landing of the Mars Spirit rover. I had watched the landing live over the web and remember the jubilation of the team members as they received the first signal alerting to the safe landing. At the news conference one of the project managers mentioned he had been working on the project for 10 years (through one previous cancellation that is, but still pretty darn good). He was beaming to see the success. And it was well deserved.

That idea entered into my book of software design philosophy: design like you'll be working on the project for 10 years. Think of the responsibility that would mean. In 10 years, you'll be paying for the short cuts and short sightedness. So don't.

Cross Compiling Fun for EclipseCon

2008-11-06T20:16:04-08:00

By Doug Schaefer

It's been a busy couple of weeks for me as we get our commercial Eclipse p2-based installer into product testing. It's looking good but there's always those last minute fires (i.e. bugs) to fight.

In the background I've been trying to set up an environment that will allow me to use the CDT to build Linux applications from my Windows box, and then run and debug those applications on a customized version of the Qemu emulator that is also built using the CDT. Once I get this environment together, I plan on presenting how to do it at EclipseCon as either a tutorial or long talk. It's a great demonstration on how well the CDT works for multi-platform development.

Why a good platform can't be free

2008-10-27T10:17:00-07:00

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.

BMW wants to go open

2008-10-23T22:36:22-07:00

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.

Security

2008-10-23T10:42:06-07:00

By Alex Wilson

I have just attended The Open Group meeting in Munich. The Open Group look after standards such as POSIX and as such Wind River are a member of the Real Time and Embedded Systems Forum.

This week as part of the Real Time Group we were looking at "Dependability through Assuredness" and had some great presentations on formal methods and security. We (or rather my boss Rob Hoffman) presented on the MILS architecture. If you want to see a demo of this technology then visit MILCOM 2008