Wind River Blog Network

Serving Windows Files from a Simics Quick-Start Platform

By Jakob Engblom

Windows file sharing has always felt a bit magical to me. I use it all the time, certainly, but I never quite understood how it worked; it was just this big chunk of Microsoft protocol that felt like it really did not want to talk to other types of operating systems. Sure, I have used the open-source "samba" server for a long time with great success… but it always seemed to suffer from issues with access rights (probably the fault of me and server setup and mixing Unix and Windows accounts, not a fault in the server itself).

With this background, I was really delighted and surprised  when  I managed to almost effortlessly get a Simics target to share and serve files to my Windows host. A big-endian Power Architecture QSP target at that, running VxWorks, how cool isn’t that? The key to the puzzle was the Visuality NQ Server from Visuality Systems Ltd. in Israel. It just worked, and let me try some interesting and educational setups.

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Analyze this…Accelerate that…

By Steve Konish

In just three short months, the engineering team at Wind River has added new, amazing capabilities to the Wind River Intelligent Network Platform.  These enhancements to the platform allow applications to go even deeper and faster than ever before.    

When we first launched the platform, it included two data plane engines for packet acceleration and pattern matching.  The two engines together created an incredible software-enabled solution to provide high-performance deep packet inspection (DPI) for network applications.  We’ve now added a third data plane engine, the Flow Analysis Engine (FAE), which allows applications to incorporate even greater network intelligence.  The Flow Analysis Engine offers complete visibility into network traffic in real time, including flow classification, protocol and application identification, and metadata extraction.

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Poll Results are in...Network Intelligence Heading to Edge and Core

By Steve Konish

If you’re an information junkie like I am, informative charts and polls always catch the eye. Polls are great for capturing an instant snapshot of public opinion on a specific topic. By no means are they scientific. However, they do give us some useful data to gauge whether or not other people share the same opinions we do.

We decided to conduct our own poll related to network intelligence. During a recent Wind River webinar, titled Triple Crown of Network Goes to Software, we took a poll of 200 attendees. If you missed the webinar, not to worry, you can view the archived version. The poll asked the audience where they think network intelligence is initially most needed. The respondents, mostly network equipment providers, gave us these results:

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Just minutes to a faster, smarter and more secure network

By Stephen Konish

A few minutes…and you’re on the fast path to building the next generation of faster, smarter and more secure network applications. Three minutes – that’s all it typically takes to install key components of the new Wind River Intelligent Network Platform. 

So, let’s take the next few minutes to look at  an evolution taking place for our networking and communications customers and Wind River’s software solutions for this market.  Tens of billions of connected devices continue to generate massive amounts of traffic and security threats are on the rise. In order to better manage the flood of traffic and handle these threats, greater network intelligence and security (without sacrificing high performance) is needed. On top of that, network products need to be scalable to handle future growth. Wind River is rising to meet these challenges and this evolution starts with the newly launched Wind River Intelligent Network Platform.  It is an integrated and optimized embedded software platform consisting of the critical runtime components needed to build high-performance intelligent network products.  So, what does that mean for the customer?

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Teaching Networking using Simics

By Jakob Engblom

Wind River Education Services provides user training for a variety of topics, including Wind River operating systems and tools, as well as more general topics like networking. Training always includes hands-on labs, which can complicate logistics for training sessions. Shipping boards and configuring networks is time-consuming and error-prone. For that reason, we are looking into using Simics as an alternative to physical hardware to streamline training logistics. It also makes it simple to encapsulate configurations, while maintaining the reality of cross-development. In this blog post, we will look at how Simics is used as a tool to facilitate network labs in the context of education.

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Got DPDK? We Can Help You!

By Glenn Seiler

If you’ve purchased a communications processor from Intel in the last year, there is a strong likelihood you are familiar with the Intel® Data Plane Development Kit. Intel DPDK, as it is commonly referred to here at Wind River, is a set of libraries that help applications transmit and receive packet data as efficiently as possible on Intel Xeon multicore processors.  System architects and designers of networking applications can leverage the Intel DPDK to accelerate packets through layer 3 to create a fast path for packets to build high performance applications.  Mastering the fast path opens the door to a world of new high-value intelligent applications like deep packet inspection (DPI), and security.

But mastering the fast path is no easy task.  This can be especially true if you are considering migration from another architecture or protocol stack to take advantage of the increased power of Intel architecture (IA). Nearly every communications company I have talked to over the last few years is starting to consider Intel architecture for data plane applications as well as the traditional applications and control plane typically that IA is used for. The good news is you don’t have to make this transition  alone.  Wind River is now making our team of technical experts available to support any Intel DPDK project regardless of underlying operating system.  Yes, Wind River will support Intel DPDK application development on any Linux whether it is Wind River Linux, your own in-house distribution, or a third party commercial Linux distribution. Check out our latest news.

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Network Performance Front & Center Everywhere: How Will the Networking Industry Respond?

By Jessica Schieve

The need for network performance rang loud and clear at CES 2012. 

The way things are shaping up, the networking industry is in for an exciting 2012. Every year, in early January, the consumer electronics industry stages one of the biggest shows in the world, International CES held in Las Vegas. Given the largely consumer feel of the show, many of us in the networking and communications industries don’t typically focus major attention on the show but this year turned out to be a bit of an the exception. There were numerous products on display that are being designed for 3G and 4G networks and there was significant buzz around indications of what’s about to seriously impact our industry. Here are a few headlines that caught my eye:

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Cloud to Service Endpoints – The Missing Link

By Paul Anderson

I remember as a kid I was fascinated with phones. The idea that you could pick up the phone, dial it, and talk to someone on the other end was pretty neat. And… at the time, a phone was an elegantly designed electro-mechanical work of art, and it was fun to take them apart to try and figure out how they worked. I could understand how the phone itself worked, but as a kid, what happened after those two wires headed off to the pole was somewhat of a mystery to me. Eventually I came to understand the massive infrastructure that allowed reliable telephone service into the home to be possible. Hats off to Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone.

When you think of a basic phone, it seems like such a simple thing. It can receive, it can transmit, and it can provide bidirectional signaling. Receiving and transmitting is obviously important, and it took a while for folks to figure out how to do both simultaneously without a bunch of extra wires and things. Signaling is equally important. The user of the device needs to know when someone is trying to contact them, and to be able to establish contact with someone else out on the network. A phone is actually a very clever thing, particularly when one thinks of what people did with what they had at the time, particularly in a world before the transistor.

But, what is a phone really? It is a service gateway. In its most simple form, it provides telephone service. That service then allows connectivity to other services, like the ability to call the plumber when your sink gets clogged, or order a pizza. Quite amazing! 

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Feeling the need for speed and making it happen

By Mark Guinther

“I feel the need…The need for speed!!”  Quoting old movies is where my similarities to Tom Cruise end, but it is a relevant line for today’s networking equipment.  Faster applications is one of the last steps in getting faster results to subscribers, resulting in happy subscribers which means happy service providers, happy service providers mean happy equipment providers, and… well, you get the point: Everybody is happier when their network runs faster. However, it’s getting tougher given the ever-increasing flood of data on today’s networks.    

Bigger, faster pipes are a start, but you can have the best infrastructure plumbing in the world and still have poor performance if your system and applications are a bottleneck. 

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Embedded is cool (and getting even cooler)

By Paul Anderson

When people ask me what I do, I never know how to answer the question. Most people state their occupation. But, does that define what we do? I usually respond with something cheeky like “metabolize,” or “provide for those around me” or “go running or fly airplanes any chance I get.” But, usually people want to know what you do for a living. I usually get stumped when they ask that particular question.

I asked my youngest child what he thought I did for a living. He said “play with computers all day,” which is not entirely inaccurate. I asked my oldest, and he said “fly airplanes” (again, I do fly a lot of airplanes, but unfortunately I spend most of my time as a passenger rather than a pilot). My pets would say my entire existence is dedicated to providing them food and entertainment (obviously they have figured something out). My wife would say that I type on the computer, talk on the phone, go to meetings, and spend way too much time in airplanes and at hotels. Although accurate, it doesn’t get at the core of what I do.

When I try to explain to people what I do in any detail, after a minute or so I see their eyes glaze over. I have taken to just saying “I’m in the software business.” I can usually get away with that, but sometime people actually want to know more.

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Getting Started with OpenSAF

By Glenn Seiler

Usage of OpenSAF is growing exponentially. The number of companies I hear from that are evaluating or considering using OpenSAF grows every month. A common trend that I see more and more often is that someone in an R&D capacity or someone charged with creating a prototype downloads OpenSAF from opensaf.org and begins working with it, to acquaint them with the technology.  For example, if you are a Wind River Linux user, you can download a pristine version of OpenSAF software directly from the Wind River Developers Network that has been pre-validated and packaged to build with Wind River’s Linux Distribution Assembly Tool (LDAT).  The version of OpenSAF you can download from Wind River Developer Network is exactly the same as the current version of OpenSAF at devel.opensaf.org, except it has been put into a ‘layer’ that is recognized and used by Wind River’s build environment. This can save significant time and effort for companies that want to do a quick analysis or build of OpenSAF.

The most common method for getting support or help for OpenSAF projects is by utilizing “community support.” The Wind River Developer Network is a great place to look for answers or to post a question. This is where members of Wind River’s OpenSAF and Linux engineering community can help. In addition, the OpenSAF project has many helpful documents and mailing lists that can provide help.  There are many mailing lists that you should consider subscribing to, including a developers mailing list that is used by many of the actual developers contributing code to the OpenSAF project.

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Is Linux Secure?

By Paul Anderson

It’s the wrong question, really. Are my financial and medical records secure? What about all that information stored in the cloud? What about my desktop computer or cell phone? What about the power grid and other infrastructure? Should I be worried?

The answer to all those questions is “It depends on what you mean by ‘secure.’” One may need to consider: What is the definition security? Or what is an acceptable level of risk at that level of security?

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Wind River Turns 30: Looking Back and Moving Forward

By Tomas Evensen 

2011 marks Wind River’s 30th anniversary. The big 3-0…it’s a major landmark moment in anyone’s book. This year, we’ll be taking time to honor this milestone with a retrospective of Wind River’s history and also a series of employee stories.  In my many years with the company, Wind River always impressed on me the concept of  being bigger than just a single product or technology. There is an underlying spirit within our teams that constantly reaches for more, for some greater innovation. While many customers know Wind River for the VxWorks real-time operating system, it was always part of the vision to provide more value. In the early days, this entailed providing a TCP/IP stack and GDB for debugging. Later, additional value came from strong IDE support through Tornado and Workbench. Lately, it has been by providing a choice of operating systems, real-time or open source/Linux. 

A standout example that exemplified the vision of providing a more complete solution was when we embarked on creating a truly embedded hypervisor. In 2004, it had already become clear to us that virtualization would play an important role in embedded designs at some point in the future. In early 2005, Paul Borman who worked for me in the CTO Office created a very impressive prototype, called eCPU, that ran VxWorks and Linux on a single CPU and we learned a lot from that effort. When Johan Fornaeus came on board in 2006 through an acquisition (he was co-founder of Interpeak and before that, one of the co-designers of the Enea/OSE operating system), I had him leading a small nimble task force team to develop a hypervisor really suited for the embedded space. I felt we made a real breakthrough. This was not a repackaged operating system pretending to be something it was not designed for, but instead a truly unique approach to virtualization and separation. Over the next couple years, this small team created a scalable product with an extremely tight footprint, incredible performance, while at the same time being full featured for the common architectures such as Intel, Power, ARM and MIPS.

Back in those days, it was not clear to us when and how important multi-OS systems would be in the future, but today it is hard to imagine how to deal with these new complex systems without a hypervisor for embedded virtualization. Looking at my team’s achievement now, I still marvel at how the Wind River Hypervisor brings together multi-core and our various operating systems. Why choose between operating systems with different characteristics when you can mix them in one system? Throw in a networking stack optimized for multi-core and tools that can debug and find performance bottlenecks and you get a very capable foundation on which our customers can innovate.

By constantly looking to the future, Wind River continues to evolve and further build on its expertise. The ongoing push to innovate may have created interesting and complex challenges along the way. However, it has also resulted in celebrations and breakthroughs, and it’s undoubtedly a big reason why so many of us continue to stay on the ride. 

 

Will embedded Linux development ever defragment?

By Paul Anderson

We have seen the power of open source and open standards transform much of the enterprise space, particularly in the server market. Before the success of open source in server space, there were really only two choices: Run an operating system and applications developed and maintained by a hardware manufacturer, or choose one of only a few commercial operating systems and applications that spanned different manufacturers.  Hardware manufacturers optimized each operating system to best suit the hardware they sold, creating a lack of compatibility between hardware manufacturers. Alternatively, commercial enterprise operating systems typically were not optimized for each hardware platform, and as a result, did not perform well. Given these scenarios, a system architect, integrator, or developer, often had to make hard choices and compromises.

With the advent of open source operating systems and applications, the software landscape changed dramatically. After a slow start, there was a bloom of available operating systems and applications available. There was little standardization or compatibility between the different operating system, distribution, and application variants. It was nice to have a choice, but all of these options also created fragmentation. With time, open standards within the enterprise space developed, from carrier grade standards (CGL), to application environment standards (LSB), to standardized application stacks (LAMP). For a variety of reasons, there has not been a single distribution or package standard, but things are now similar enough that system architects, integrators, and developers have a fairly standardized environment and a rich ecosystem of hardware and software from which to choose.

Now consider the embedded community – the world of deeply embedded development has evolved in a much different manner.

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Embedded Virtualization Opens New Possibilities

By Mark Hermeling

One of the things that stands out in many customer visits that I do is that embedded virtualization often enables possibilities that the customer never thought possible. This of course is a good thing, it may enable them to put a new product to market that the customer had never thought of. In a few cases I have seen customers use virtualization to shift their business models from shipping custom hardware to shipping software only using COTS boards. Virtualization in this case is used to provide the customization that they formerly needed hardware for.

I went on a customer call earlier this year to a customer that was looking to go to multi-core. The customer was building a networking product and was using VxWorks on a single core Intel processor and wanted the additional processing power that a dual or quad-core could provide. They wanted to go to multi-core and came to Wind River to see what their options were. 

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Service-enabled gateways – The heart of the connected home

By Jessica Schieve

As we ring in the new year, 120,000+ people will descend on Las Vegas for the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show. The drumbeat to promote the next hot mobile or consumer device, application and technology is in full swing. The industry will be abuzz with press releases, product announcements and new partnerships.  And, yes, Wind River is gearing up for CES too. If you want to chat with us, give us a shout and we can definitely make time. 

This year, Wind River and Mindspeed have teamed up to deliver a turnkey high-performance reference platform to speed the development of service-enabling gateways. Gateways are quickly becoming the control point to manage broadband content and services. They are truly becoming the heart of the connected home.

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Wind River Network Acceleration Platform Wins Best Software Award

By Jessica Schieve

Last night I had the pleasure of attending the 2010 ATCA Summit Best of Show Awards ceremony where Wind River was presented the Best Software award for its Wind River Network Acceleration Platform.  
This is a major accomplishment for a industry solution that was launched less than a year ago. The panel of judges included industry editors as well as networking and telecom ecosystem peers.

So why would Wind River Network Acceleration Platform win top honors?  Let's consider the following. As I sat in a presentation about the future of 40G applications, one speaker from a prominent COTS board company discussed six different approaches to achieving the capacity and throughput needed to make 40G a reality.

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Embedded Virtualization in Gaming

By Mark Hermeling

A few weeks ago I found myself in the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. My reason for being there was a seminar that Wind River was organizing together with Intel and AVNET specifically focussed on companies that build gaming. The main topics were graphics, manageability and of course, virtualization.

I am always eager to fold real-life examples into my presentations, hence I decided to try my luck at some of the slot machines in the Hard Rock Hotel under the disguise of 'domain study'. And I have to say, the state of slot machines has progressed significantly since the last time that I was in Vegas many years ago. The top of the line machines had multiple 30" inch displays with either static or moving imagery, they had player tracking, surround sound, some of them even had imagery over the rolls themselves.

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Embedded Virtualization and Multi-Core

By Mark Hermeling

VDC has released a recent report showing that multi-core is making fast inroads in embedded systems and we are seeing that at Wind River as well. There are exciting new possibilities with these chips, we have never had this much processing power in such small packages.

Take for example Freescale's new P4080 chip, 8 cores, 2 memory busses and a wealth of peripherals that are designed for multicore usage (such as the data path acceleration architecture (DPAA)). There are many things to consider with this new chip, I have blogged before about the many primary multi-core configurations available from SMP to uAMP, to sAMP to core virtualized. You have to consider partitioning, or virtualizing cores, memory and devices.

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The Virtual Basil Fawlty

By Jakob Engblom

In the 1970's BBC comedy show Fawlty Towers, John Cleese manages to turn harmless everyday situations into total disasters, with very little effort. It is a marvellous example of how to inject faults into what could have been a smoothly operating hotel, and demonstrating just how things fall apart as the unexpected happens. Injecting faults isn't always that easy, unfortunately (or should that be fortunately)?

I recently read an article by Steve Chessin in ACM Queue about fault injection, where he discusses how the UltraSPARC II and III systems from the late 1990s and early 2000s supported hardware fault injection in order to test the ability of the system to recover from faults. In this case, injecting faults was a bit more difficult than roaming around in a hotel beating your hapless waiter with a frying pan or insulting the guests. In the article, he makes a very important statement:

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Is your embedded device ready for IPv6?

By Bill Graham

Although we knew this was coming, the U.S. (and really, everyone else) is running out of IPv4 addresses. According to Information Week, 94.5 percent of the public IPv4 addresses that have been allocated to the U.S. are already used, the remaining addresses are expected to run out within a year. Moreover, the U.S. has been assigned 90 percent of all available IP addresses, effectively making this a global problem. 

As you may know, IPv4 address are the normal a.b.c.d numbers, represented by 32 bits that we are used to seeing on our computers and other Internet-connected devices. The rapid growth of mobile and Internet connected devices has greatly accelerated the use of IPv4 addresses. In fact, machine-to-machine (M2M) growth predicted in the next few years means that solving this problem is an imperative - there simply will not be any IPv4 addresses left to assign. IPv6 uses a 128-bit addressing scheme that should suffice for the foreseeable future. 

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Got a few minutes?

By Dinyar Dastoor

There are several things you can do in a matter of minutes. You can walk over to a coffee machine and make yourself a tasty stimulating drink. Or you can open Wind River's Embedded Development Kit and start evaluating your application on a fully functional hardware/software ready reference platform in the same time interval.

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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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