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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Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints

By Jakob Engblom

I have a paper about "Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints" to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Wind River Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right.

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Consolidate, Consolidate, Consolidate

By Mark Hermeling

Many telecom applications are actually built up from multiple smaller sub-applications, often running on their own server in a rack, ATCA or otherwise. These servers run on multi-core processors, depending on the age of the last refresh this could be a dual, quad core or more. This is of course nothing new, what's new is how virtualization can improve server utilization.

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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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It’s Time for Testers to Step Up

By Paul Henderson

RTC Magazine recently published an article that I wrote called "Time to Rethink Software Testing for Embedded Devices". In it I describe some of the new techniques that are possible, and I believe necessary, to delivery high quality device software for embedded devices.

• When staying 'positive' doesn't pay
• Getting negative with white box testing
• Focusing on the 'deltas' with change-based test automation

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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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Industry Investing in Better Device Runtime Visibility During Testing

By Paul Henderson

Here’s the final installment in my series about 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 what test tools they use today and where they are investing in test automation. Given the high cost of product failure, accelerating complexity and reduced schedules the industry is turning to more test automation in 2010 to help address these problems. The top investment are moving to new tools that can help test teams and their management better understand how well they are testing, better focus their efforts on the areas needing testing, and reduce cycle time through more automation.

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The High Cost of Poor Quality – Brand, Market, Budget

By Paul Henderson

I’m continuing my series on our embedded device industry software 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.com and I will send it to you.

In this section of the survey we asked participants about how they measure the high cost of poor quality. Respondents told us that the true cost of poor quality is much higher than program budget. The majority of respondents showed that the true cost of poor quality is measure by damage to company brand and lost revenue due to missed market windows.

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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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A Crisis of Complexity – Industry Report on Growing Challenges in Embedded Testing

By Paul Henderson

I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.

The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest.  So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails. 

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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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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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Wind River @ IBM Rational Innovate 2010

By Paul Henderson

Today marked the opening of the annual IBM Rational Software developer conference, this year called Innovate 2010, here in Orlando Florida.

The 4 day event is covering a range of topics on both IT and embedded systems software development and test lifecycle tools and technologies. Wind River has a presence on the exhibit floor and a number of conference tracks. The mood is very positive at this 13th conference. 4000 attendees are here, a 20% growth over 2009.

The show opened with several IBM executives led by Dr. Danny Sabbah, GM IBM Rational Software reviewing IBM's "Smarter Planet" strategy including "systems and software econometrics". Dr. Sabbah described how software innovations are now driving the world, particularly as related to intelligent products and services.  

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Multicore: Simplify by Understanding Key Use Cases

By Bill Graham

Wind River's CTO, Tomas Evensen gave a keynote at the Multicore Expo in San Jose entitled "Surviving the Software Avalanche: Simplifying Multicore". There certainly has been much discussion of multicore by many people (myself included) over the years but we are getting to a point now that we are seeing multicore use cases coalescing in the marketplace.

I think a lot of us learn better by example and when we see multicore used in a real customer use cases, we see the benefit and value much more.

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Battling the Bottleneck

By Mark Guinther

I have crossed to the other side of the generation gap.  While growing up in Michigan, I remember my parents telling me about their primitive childhood experiences: walking 4 miles through the snow each way to school, uphill both ways, no TV, no microwave oven, only one family car… 

Now my own kids stare in disbelief when I tell them that I grew up in a home with only one phone attached to a wall, no worldwide web, no laptop, and no cell phones with text messaging. They visualize me as a caveman back in the Stone Age.

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A Few Ashes in the Sky Made Me Virtual

By Michel Genard

I wished I was a virtual system. We take for granted that access to the infrastructure is always on and available for telecommunications, broadband, and travel. Well, some ashes from the remote volcano brought human beings back to earth.

I am in France right now, part of a two-week EMEA tour to visit our field and customers, and I am grounded; I can’t travel to Sweden and I still don’t know when I will make it back to the U.S. The icing on the cake is that the France union decided on another French specialty (not culinary): a train strike. So I’m going to use virtual infrastructure (i.e., WebEx) to take care of my meeting this week; not so bad after all. I could have been stuck in a worse place than Paris.

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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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VxWorks Helping to Bring LTE Down Under

By Bill Graham

Our customer, Huawei, recently announced they have been chosen to deploy Australia's first LTE network. This is great news because Huawei's LTE base stations are built using VxWorks - the VxWorks Platform for Networking Equipment to be exact.

It's also great news because we are starting to see the fruits of our customers' efforts come to reality and it stands as a validation of our investment in next generation networks. Moreover, this is the latest in a set of successes we've had with VxWorks in the networking space.

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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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A Decade at Wind River

By Paul Parkinson

On Wednesday, it will be exactly ten years since I joined Wind River.

I was thinking about this on my flight to San Francisco on Saturday, and as well as wondering how I long I've spent watching the VxWorks boot loader counting down to zero on the serial console over the years, I was also reminiscing about my early days with the company.

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VxWorks is Helping Power the Next Generation of Wireless Networks

By Bill Graham

You are probably wondering what an RTOS has to do with wireless networks. Well, a lot, actually.  VxWorks is used extensively in telecom/datacom infrastructure including 3G and next generation networks 4G, LTE (Long Term Evolution) and WiMax.

As you have likely heard, the current 3G networks are straining from the demand from new wireless smartphones such as the iPhone. Networking companies that build the infrastructure for these networks have clear marching orders - the next generation must handle more data and for more customers. We're hearing requirements for 10 to 20 times the current capabilities.

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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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Integrated Hardware, Software and Lasagna

By Mark Hermeling

The fact that almost everybody in North America is either packing for the holidays, or has already left gives me a chance to finally write about an exchange I had with a customer a while ago.

We were discussing how the hardware side of embedded software development had changed over the past years. Where in 'the olden days', things would start by bolting a processor on top of a breadboard of some kind, todays development typically starts with an out-of-the-box hardware solution.

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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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Making Multicore CPUs Work in Embedded Communications Designs

By Mark Hermeling

A good article by Jarrod Siket highlighting the need for a good heterogenous multicore design to be able to meet the need of embedded communications systems. I couldn't agree more. Jarrod has a number of good suggestions as to which engineering challenges need to be addressed. The article is quite timely as I just finished a webinar with Kontron on Multicore and virtualization focussing on ATCA.

Jarrod also makes the statement that 'no other processor architecture is more widely adopted or better suited than x86'. I'll certainly agree that x86 is widely adopted and that it has been doing virtualization longer than the other architectures out there due to it's IT roots.

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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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