 |
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Nikhil Chauhan
Wi-Fi Alliance launches a specification called Wi-Fi Direct that allows WLAN (Wireless LAN) devices to connect directly without an Access Point in between. Well, well, this appears to be a war of worlds between the WLAN and Bluetooth camps because this surely will fit the use cases of Bluetooth users. Does this also mean the end of WLAN Access Points (AP)? That's yet to be seen.
802.11 WLAN technology, as you might be aware of, offers two types of WLANs: 'Ad Hoc' and 'Infrastructure'. The 'Ad Hoc', termed as IBSS (Independent Basic Service Set), allows two WLAN stations to talk to each other directly. In other words, this is technology that exists today. So, what's the new hoopla around Wi-Fi Direct.
By Nikhil Chauhan
Ever wondered what it would be like without access to ever increasing means of connection?
Thanks to social networking sites that I am now in touch with my friends who used to exchange bicycles while riding to my fifth grade class.
In the past decade or so, we have come a long way. The social norms have been re-defined with applications such as social networking, M-commerce, E-Commerce, virtual world, remote health monitoring, E-readers, media streaming and storage, etc. All of these are resulting in an explosion in global internet traffic. Cisco forecasts that the annual global IP traffic will reach half a zettabyte in 2012.
By Jessica Schieve
I recently spent an afternoon at the 2009 4G World Conference held in Chicago. This was a rather small conference on a very big topic. There were a variety of vendors on hand exhibiting their wares: antennas, microwaves, connectors, and even complete end-to-end 4G systems. Some of the leading telecom equipment providers were showing their latest gear: Alcatel-Lucent, Alvarion, Motorola, Nokia-Siemens, Samsung, WiChorus, and ZTE. Notably not present in any comparable way were Cisco, Huawei and Ericsson.
Motorola, a huge investor in WiMAX, was showcasing everything from infrastructure gear to new CPE devices. It had on display a new network-connected smart meter based on WiMAX technology.
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.
By Glenn Seiler
I just returned from the second annual OpenSAF Developers Days. This was a two-day event that included discussions on the latest developments in the project, some of the new standards that have been defined by the Service Availability Forum and the project's road map plans for the next release. The event was hosted by Huawei at their corporate headquarters in Shenzhen, China. One of the reasons the project choose to do the event in China this year is because they wanted it to be accessible to the ever-increasing number of development teams in Asia Pacific. From the turnout I would have to say this was a very successful event. The event was attended by major TEMs from Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, as well as by leading platform providers and operating system vendors. In case you are not familiar with OpenSAF, it is an open source implementation of the Service Availability Forum's (SAF) standard for application high availability. Specifically it is based on the Application Interface Specification (AIS) but also adds other capabilities that are key for high availability such as hardware interface and system management. The project is 100 percent open source and uses the LGPL license. The OpenSAF project is about two years old now, however it was changed to the LGPL license in January 2008 and since then has experienced significant growth. There were over 200 individual contributions in 2008, which is the sign of a strong, active community. OpenSAF is being developed into LTE gateways; IMS servers and other core and edge devices and some of the devices are in operator networks today.
By Jessica Schieve
Did you know 25% to 50% of deployed device failures are due to software defects? This statistic should be nowhere near this high, considering there are a few very good solutions out there today to help reduce the number of defects in software code.
In the networking and telecom industry, if equipment fails and brings down the network it can cost a service provider or operator millions of dollars in lost revenue or even lost customers (read this white paper to learn more). If you are an equipment provider and the failure is associated with your application, the lost revenue cost could very well be passed on to you. And count on the network failure to be all over the headline news like the one that hit the New York Times.
By Jessica Schieve
Networking and telecom equipment providers often struggle with three common business issues:
Finding a solution to tackle one of these issues is of great value. Wouldn’t it be even better if there was a solution that addressed all three?
That solution is the Wind River Partner Validation Program.
By Jessica Schieve
This past week I attended the Light Reading ATCA & Communications Ecosystem Conference in San Jose, CA. This live event attracted about 120 people including ATCA system developers, ecosystem vendors, and consortia. Here is a quick list of the companies I recognized at the event:
By Jessica Schieve
What’s going on with the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA) push into next generation networking? Light Reading is expecting this market opportunity to reach $7.2 billion by 2012. This growth is impressive. Can it continue? Is there another wave of growth coming? Or, is the industry moving in another direction? Who best to know.....the ecosystem.
When I first started following this industry there were well over 100 software and hardware technology companies working on the advancement and adoption of the ATCA standard. These companies have formed an impressive ecosystem representing silicon, COTS boards, hardware components, carrier grade operating systems, high availability and network management middleware technologies, to name a few.
By Jessica Schieve
When we hear the words "Mobile World Congress" we immediately think of a huge trade show focused entirely on the latest and greatest smartphone technology. Over the past few years smarthphones have certainly generated a lot of attention. This year was no exception. Pre-event buzz was all about Google’s Android open source platform. Oddly, only a few announcements have been made, Huawei’s entry into the smartphone market with their Android-based prototype and the new HTC phone, Magic.
But Mobile World is about so much more. Long before smartphones entered the scene, Mobile World Congress (3GSM) had a huge focus on next generation network technologies. I'm happy to report the real buzz going on at this year's show was not on the end user device but on the next generation infrastructure, Long Term Evolution (LTE).
By Paul Parkinson
One of the Christmas presents I received was the book The Edge of Madness by Michael Dobbs. It's a novel about cyber warfare and is set in the present day. Despite mixed reviews of the book in the media (Daily Telegraph, Guardian), I found it to be a gripping read, and finished it over two evenings.
The reason why it held my attention was because of its central theme: the imminent threat of cyber warfare against a nation through co-ordinated attacks against critical national infrastructure (banking, commerce, energy, telecommunications, etc.) bypassing national defence forces. Although we have yet to witness an offensive on this scale, there have been several instances of international cyber warfare in recent years, so perhaps these can only escalate in the future?
By Jessica Schieve
There is an interesting article in the December issue of the Economist, “How Green Is Your Network?” The article states that telecom networks and the devices they connect account for 1% of global greenhouse-gas emissions. I’m a little shocked but I guess I shouldn’t be. It takes a lot of resource to keep networks up and running. On a related note, I recently overheard an executive from a very well-known semiconductor company comment that for every two dollars spent building a piece of network equipment it takes another dollar just to power it and keep it running.
The good news is the telecom industry is well aware of the excessive amounts of energy its equipment consumes. And, according to the article, companies such as Vodafone are employing various field-level tactics to reduce this consumption. Painting base stations white to reflect the sun’s heat and ultimately use less cooling power is one example.
By Jessica Schieve
I’ve been going to technology trade shows for several years now. Recently I’ve found myself attending and participating in shows that promote 3G and 4G technologies for next-generation networking. The common themes are usually about enabling a richer broadband experience using voice, video, data, and other multimedia content—whatever people can dream up. For the most part consumers have been very clever at how they leverage all this broadband capability. YouTube is a perfect example.
It finally looks like the technology companies that enable this richer broadband experience are learning how to leverage what they helped create. A great example of this is the ATCA Worldwide virtual trade show. ATCA, which stands for Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture, is one of the key industry standards being used for the equipment going into the next-generation network infrastructure. It is this infrastructure that is enabling more and more network bandwidth.
By Paul Tingey
Fifteen years ago this week, on the 30th of April 1993, two directors from the CERN Particle Physics Laboratory signed and published a document which relinquished "all intellectual property rights to" and permitted "anyone to use, duplicate, modify and redistribute" a technology they referred to as W3.
Today W3 is better know as the World Wide Web, but the concept is the same; a scalable, platform independent information medium where documents are connected through hypertext links. This ground breaking idea was the brainchild of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a respected technology visionary.
By Paul Tingey
There seems to have many news stories about the imminent rise of 3G technology in the UK over the last few years. Looking back these stories would seem to have heralded repeated false dawns with 3G being relegated to little more than another mobile voice calling technology. However we now seem to have positive proof that 3G based mobile broadband is becoming a viable alternative to (or addition to) more traditional broadband technologies for UK users.
In a blog entry titled Mobile net takes off, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC includes what he describes as "an extraordinary graph" showing how the amount of data crossing the 3 mobile operator's 3G network has increased 14 fold in just six months.
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.
By Paul Parkinson
I read last week that BMW has been researching the use of the Internet Protocol (IP) over standard Ethernet (Cisco) to network automotive controllers ('BMW brings Internet protocol under the hood', EETimes).
The motivation for the research is that at present, a number of different networking technologies (including CAN, LIN, MOST and FlexRay) are used in automotive applications, and these are optimized for different types of application, but the lack of standardization results in complexity and cost.
So, I was expecting the article to say that BMW had found Ethernet to be suitable for non-critical applications, but not well-suited to critical systems.
By Paul Parkinson
Yesterday, I attended the UK's Military Aerospace & Electronics technical conference and exhibition, which was held at the Heritage Motor Centre.
The technical conference was split into three technical tracks, which
were broadly related to avionics, land systems and technologies; and as
is sometimes the case at these conferences I found that I wanted to
attend some presentations which were running concurrently!
By Martin Oberhuber
The Eclipse DSDP Target Management Project submitted a critical patch release of its Remote System Explorer (RSE) on Friday Jul 6. TM 2.0.0.1 fixes the following issues by changing 6 lines of Java code compared to TM 2.0 released with Eclipse Europa:
By Warren Kurisu
Previously, our CMO John Bruggeman blogged about the importance of Service and Support for Linux. He called it the killer app for Linux.
We recently announced our new VxWorks and Wind River Linux platforms, which integrate the Wind River Advanced Networking Technologies. This technology portfolio is a best-of-breed combination of technologies developed by Wind River and those acquired from Interpeak. That is great news for VxWorks and Wind River Linux customers, but what about Interpeak customers using Integrity?
By Doug Gaff
Following up on today’s announcement of milestones in three of the DSDP projects—eRCP 1.0, MTJ 0.7, and TM 1.0—I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on DSDP…how it started, where it is today, and where it’s heading. First, let me start with a timeline of project events.
March 2005. Unofficially, the DSDP project got its start at a BoF session during EclispeCon last year. At the BoF, several device software tools vendors assembled to discuss the need for more embedded-specific functionality in Eclipse, specifically in the debugging area. There was acknowledgment of CDT and its extensive contribution to tooling in the embedded space, but there was also a desire to see more enhancements in the Eclipse Platform and more of a breadth of functionality around device software development. Shortly after EclipseCon, Wind River proposed the DSDP project and its two initial sub-projects, Target Management and Device Debugging. The TM project set out to build a framework and UI for managing remote embedded devices. The DD project initially focused on working with the Eclipse Platform Debug team to create a more customizable debugging framework in the Platform.
By Martin Oberhuber
The Target Management Project started its 2nd round of coordinated testing these days on its first release candidate, RSE 1.0RC1.
The interesting part of this test effort is, that it does not only involve committers but also many users who volunteered to join the testing. It looks like the users understand, that joining a coordinated test early helps each of them by achieving better quality - at little cost if lots of people join. The original test invitation E-Mail had been sent directly to all users we've had contact with, plus the tm-dev mailing list.
By Paul Tingey
There is no doubt that open or industry standards now cover a large proportion of the technology components used in telecoms infrastructure equipment (as well as other markets). They have been so widely accepted that hardware, software and silicon manufacturers have organized themselves into consortia to coordinate their effects and create widely accepted standards within their technology fields.
In fact, the drive towards standardized components has become so widespread that these consortia have now created an industry movement of their own which requires coordination and marketing effort. So whose job is that?
By Paul Tingey
Most of the customers I speak to regularly are best described as being in the "telecoms infrastructure equipment" industry and I can honestly say that, without exception, they have all seen significant changes happening in the way they operate over the last few years.
These changes were, and continue to be, driven by a demand for feature-rich applications and increased network bandwidth. The evolution of new technologies such as DSL, 3G and WiFi quickly followed by VoIP, WiMax and IMS has been the catalyst for an increasing demand for new communication "experiences". Users are now looking for feature-rich applications and, critically, they want them today.
Net stack vendor, LVL7, announced it will base its flagship "Fastpath" products on Wind River Linux. You can read the entire article on LinuxDevices.com.
According to the article LVL7, originally launched Fastpath in 2002 by partnering with Red Hat and MontaVista. Moving forward, LVL7's Fastpath stack will be optimized for Wind River's Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition.
- Linux Devices Article: Net stack vendor picks embedded Linux partner
- LVL7 Press Release: LVL7 and Wind River strike Linux partnership
Wind River Platform for Network Equipment:
Robert Carroll
Wind River Blogs
A&D
Ares Defense Technology Blog
Defense Industry Daily
The Mil And Aero Blog
Automotive
Autopia
Business Exchange Vehicle Telematics Blog
Car Tech
The Auto Beat
Embedded
EDN Embedded Webblog
The EE Times Blog
VDC’s On Target: Embedded Systems
Mobile
Android Developers Blog
AndroidGuys
LiMo Foundation Blog
Multicore/Virtualization
Go Parallel
Multicore Association
MulticoreInfo.com
Virtualization Journal
Virtualization Report
Virtually Speaking
Networking
OpenSAF Foundation
Scope Alliance
Service Availability Forum
Subscribe to RSS feed.
