Wind River Blog Network

Interview with Girish Venkatasubramanian

By Jakob Engblom

After my blog post on Academic Simics earlier this Summer, I got a very nice reply from Girish Venkatasubramanian of UFL. Turned out that he and his group was doing some really interesting and exciting stuff with Simics, researching into Hypervisor architectures and hardware support. Having been a PhD student myself, I can certainly appreciate the excitement and fun of working in that field. We ended up doing a virtual interview, which I am happy to present here.

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Coming Next Week: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

We have been busy creating a new resource for our Linux users to connect with others! One of the most high profile and exciting initiatives that I've been tasked with, is to partner with other Wind River staff, and create a place for Linux users of all kinds to come together. We've heard what our customers have been asking for and they were the key drivers behind this project:

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The ‘Big Reveal’ Release Approach in Mobile Linux – How Android and MeeGo Differ

By Chris Buerger

A couple of weeks ago, I read through a somewhat heated email thread about the ‘Big Reveal’ mentality that Intel and Nokia were claimed to apply to the pending MeeGo 1.0 release. By coincidence, the timing overlapped with the excitement Google was stirring up for its 2.2 (Froyo) release of Android. Both events made me wonder about the value of a ‘big reveal’ approach in mobile open source stacks, and whether there might not be developments that occur within rapidly maturing software stacks that are native and systemic to the open source model, and that at the same time change the potential impact of ‘Big Reveal’ releases of either Android or MeeGo.

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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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Android Market Integration - Do You Still Care?

By Chris Buerger

In the mobile phone world, content management systems to allow users to download a variety of monetizable content and (largely J2ME based) applications have been around for more than a decade. Of course, the popularity of the iPhone and its associated AppStore have put a special spotlight on the importance of having a well-stocked offering to personalize a mobile device with, well, anything looking like a software application that you could possibly imagine you ever needed to have access to on a device that primarily lives in your pocket or purse.

One of the main developments during the last couple of years is that the aspect of ensuring API compliance and adequate performance of the mobile application with the underlying OS/virtual machine/execution environment, which previously was largely hidden because it was operator managed, has become a hotly discussed area. This is creating much friction between application developers, handset manufacturers, system integrators, operators and the OS gate keeper to the market place. In the case of the iPhone and Android, this responsibility is now largely assumed by Apple and Google respectively.

 

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Stark Bloggin' Mad!

By Emeka Nwafor

Wow!!! OK, so how is it that a few innocent tweets about the iPad gets me embroiled in a little Twitter / blogosphere skirmish with a colleague? Who would have thunk it? It's not just Schaefer, almost everyone seems to have formulated an opinion or a prediction about the future of mobile computing.

Following last week's announcement of the Apple iPad there has been an impressive flood of blogs, microblogs, and YouTube from pundits and pranksters, alike.  I don't recall a technology preview that had as much publicly generated hype and excitement as the iPad announcement.

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2010 Is The Year Of Embedded Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

I believe that 2010 will be the year of embedded virtualization, all the signs point in the right direction. It always takes a while for new technology to grab the imagination of embedded device developers.

Embedded developers are traditionally a conservative bunch, however, the benefits of virtualization can not be ignored, even by them.

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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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Commercial Open-Source; An Oxymoron?

By Nithya Ruff

The dictionary describes Oxymorons as "literary figures of speech usually composed of a pair of neighboring contradictory words (often within a sentence) or a combination of contradictory or incongruous words".

Perhaps some view commercialization of open source as contradictory. Where does it say that paying for good value is wrong or having a strong and commercially viable entity support the use and practice of open source is bad. Exactly, almost like motherhood and apple pie. Open Source, like art has long had a history of benefactors, sponsors and champions. Companies who gave back because they use open source. Companies who champion open source maintainers by having them on the payroll and giving them the freedom to do what they do best. Companies and commercial entities find many ways of giving back.

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Open Source Symbian and the Inescapable Truth of Product Lifecycles

By Jason Whitmire

The announcement one year ago that Symbian will be open sourced under a license free platform in 1HCY10 was heard around the world. If we are to believe game theory, the motivations behind this move are not a non-zero sum game but rather one of rational choice by its major stakeholders. But what does Open Source Symbian really mean for all of the players involved?  Recent press commentary on the announcement might suggest that the leading ascendant contenders for the unifying Open Source platform – Android, Moblin, and LiMo – will somehow be cannibalized by a resurgent Symbian platform that is "free."

Indeed, in the mobile industry, invariably, there is always that big announcement that gains mindshare from industry pundits who can see the future (I recall WCDMA handset launches enjoyed similar attention in 2000). However I believe the opposite is true in the case of Symbian, that its demise as it nears an end to a natural product lifecycle will only be accelerated when it is made available under an open source license next year.

Here are 7 reasons why I believe this to be the case:

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OpenSAF Developer Days 2009

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.

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The Telecom Consortia Alphabet Soup

By Glenn Seiler

What do they all mean and how are they different…

I often get asked what is the difference between the LiMo Foundation and the Open Handset Alliance, or what is the difference between the SCOPE Alliance Carrier Grade OS and Carrier Grade Linux or the difference between SAF and OpenSAF on the infrastructure side of the business. Unless you are really close to the Telecom industry in some capacity that is directly involved with one of those organizations, it can all seem very confusing as well as a bit redundant. In actuality there is very little overlap and each organization fits a very specific role in the ecosystem. First, it is important to note that both the maturity and the objective of the consortia are quite different between the terminal (or handset) side of the business and the infrastructure side. Another key distinction is what I like to call “solutions-based” consortia and “open standards” based consortia. Almost all of the hand-set consortia getting hype in the press today are “solutions-based” consortia such as the LiMo Foundation and the Open Handset Alliance. These consortia are not focused on creating standards that drive wide interoperability. Rather their objective is to drive a specific solution to market and preferably, to gain a market advantage while doing that. And on top of that, only members of the consortia have access to the solution(s). These consortia are really more of a large business development group, each member company focused on how they can drive business through the consortia. Now, there is nothing particularly wrong with that and it is an important part of growing a nascent market, as long as you don’t confuse it with developing standards. The infrastructure part of telecom is a bit more mature, leveraging off of the wireline business that has existed for nearly a century.  The primary objective of open-standards based consortia in the infrastructure market is usually to define standards that ultimately create an even playing field for all companies in a market, whether they are members of the consortia or not. The solutions-based consortia (LiMo and OHA) create implementations or reference platforms for a specific set of software that may be open source or proprietary and is usually a combination of both.

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Avionics 09

By Alex Wilson

I am back in the office after a busy few weeks at Embedded World and Avionics 09. I read in the news that the third C-130AMP has its first flight ahead of schedule which is excellent news in these days of doom and gloom over the economy!

The C-130 AMP is a heavy user of our technology, so that prompted me to go ahead and write about Avionics 09. Wind River had a very busy show, with a conference paper, 3 workshops and a master class, which kept us all busy for the two days!

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Emulation versus Multi-Platform

By Doug Schaefer

Over the last little while, when I could steal away a few minutes from my busy day job as of late, I've been thinking more about open platforms for handheld and set top consoles that makes good use of the 3D hardware that is becoming common place in these platforms. Of course, being open, I'm talking about open source and royalty free APIs like Linux and OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

I've been very excited about the LGPL'ing of the Qt C++ application framework. The programming paradigm is very clean and the library set is huge, including my favorite, the WebKit browser, and, of course, OpenGL support.

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IANAL, BSD, GPL, LGPL, ABCs

By Doug Schaefer

Slashdot pointed me to this article by Bruce Parens aimed at clearing some of the air around using GPL and LGPL and commercially licensed product on the same device. Of course, the summary of the article is "Check with your lawyer" as it should be. But I hope it alleviates fears over the FSF licenses that I know people have.

I especially like the description of the motivation that open source developers use to license their software. BSD is a "gift" software license. The developer is giving it to you as a gift, do with it as you wish, just give him some of the credit. LGPL is "non-gift". And I get it. They essentially don't want you using their stuff for free unless you help with it. And then you have GPL, which falls into the category that they just don't want you using their stuff for free, unless you're doing your stuff for free too. This categorization puts a little bit of a human face on it, and I appreciate that.

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Can an LGPL Qt give C++ a lift?

By Doug Schaefer

Black Duck recently announced their top Rookie Open Source projects for 2008 which using a bit of a weird metric, revealed the top 10 open source projects that were created in 2008 that had the highest number of releases. More releases makes you good? O.K...

Anyway, the most interesting information from their news release was the stats they gathered on what programming languages these new projects were using. To the surprise of many, 47% of them were written in C (C Rules!). That was followed by 28% in Java and 20% in JavaScript. It's pretty interesting there was so much JavaScript usage. And again, these were projects that have just been created. But when you look at it, most open source projects target Linux, and by far the most popular language for Linux is still C.

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Operators return to Barcelona, (this time) armed with Open Source

By Jason Whitmire

Scene Setter
26 years after GSM was created to design a pan-European mobile technology, Mobile World Congress number 13 is set to take place in Barcelona in February. This time around, as they did when GSM World Congress was first held in Madrid in 1995, mobile network operators will dominate the scene. 

Next month, however, the topic of discussion will not be new network deployments, or the latest traunch of jazzy new devices, or the next best application. Rather, Open Source will be topic Number 1 on the operator agenda in 2009. As changing operator strategies include the need for a strategic terminal platform that they can influence, the tectonic plates that once defined how a device was created and deployed are shifting and fueling significant change in the value chain.

A Brave, New Ecosystem
Whether it be the proliferation of phone development activity around Google’s Android stack, the phenomenal operator gravitation toward the LiMo Foundation, or Symbian’s intriguing announcement to open source its end-of-life cycle stack, the mobile industry is breaking out of the traditional controlled development environment to favor collaboration that accelerates innovation. The use of open source software in mobile is exploding from the operating system all the way up to the user experience, and Linux-based open source stacks are moving well beyond alpha stage with backing by industry heavy weights.

Indeed, the ubiquity of open source is causing not only a fundamental shift in proprietary OEM software deployment, but also accelerating the opening of the operator walled garden. As VisionMobile’s Andreas Constantinou – arguably the industry’s most astute pundit of open source in mobile – has pointed out, strategic “shared” core software platforms are “in” (versus supporting and maintaining up to ten proprietary stacks in an operator portfolio).

Innovating on a Perceived Commodity
Given that almost every major operator has now launched some sort of Linux device, operator versions of open source stacks are entering the optimization phase, aiming to reduce costs of bringing new Linux devices to market, more rapidly evolve on-device and network-based services, and speed application testing and certification. These highly optimized stacks will allow the operators and their OEM and ISV partners to shift the focus of innovation from the baseline software to the applications, services, and user experiences that will ultimately provide the basis for differentiation and subscriber and revenue growth.

At the same time, the complexity of open source coupled with proprietary software assets has forced operators to quickly get smart – few companies in mobile offer the indemnification, quality metrics, warranties, and SLAs that were intrinsic to the fully proprietary software paradigm. Yet this is exactly what the operators and their partners seek to allow them to overcome the last business hurdle to open source adoption.

Take-aways, Before You Reach Costa Brava

• A number of trends (community content, me-portals, WiFi, etc.) will accelerate the crumbling of once venerable operator walled garden.

• Operators recognize that the mobile device software experience must improve across devices, with a critical need to bring all-internet experience to mobile devices.

• Chipset manufacturers will continue to rapidly embrace open source stacks (Android, Limo, Moblin) as service providers send downstream requirements that reward pre-optimized hardware-software combinations. Expect multiple commercial devices and demos on all three software platforms in Barcelona.


• As memory and CPU constraints disappear, open source will allow mobile device to become true application servers, not just smart mobile phones.


• Fragmentation in mobile device software is out, shared core software platforms are in.

• Nevertheless, fragmentation of developer ecosystems (LiMo, Android, Moblin, Symbian, Blackberry, iPhone, Palm…) will constrain the pace of innovation in the mobile market.


• Operators will be making fundamental decisions about which stacks to deploy (Android, LiMo, Moblin, Symbian, etc.) while larger ODMs shift their attention to learn open source.

• Operators will increasingly require commercial solutions that protect signature applications while leveraging open source’s innovation rate

Have fun !

Jason Whitmire has more than 15 years of executive marketing and management experience in semiconductor and system software. He currently serves as General Manager of Wind River’s Mobile Solutions business. Previously he was a managing director of FSMLabs, where he headed the worldwide wireless and EMEA businesses, and he was head of business development for wireless software at Infineon Technologies for four years. Additionally, Jason has held senior product management, marketing and business development positions at two European mobile network operators. Jason got his start in the wireless arena in 1993 while representing the US government in international spectrum and privatization negotiations.

Fun with my little VIA console

By Doug Schaefer

At the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose this year they handed out little VIA embedded EPIA systems to the attendees. I'm not sure everyone got one, but I was thrilled. It has a embedded VIA processor with a chipset that includes Unichrome 3D graphics, and also include a hard drive, ethernet, VGA, four USB ports, and audio in and out. It's a cool little unit.

I haven't done too much with it, but thinking about this Open Console concept (set top box with 3D graphics running Linux), I thought I'd try setting it up with some of the things I had in mind. I started by putting the Debian lenny installer onto a USB stick and installing from it. That was a little tricky until I reformated my USB stick and put syslinux on it properly. I installed enough packages to get X running with the openchrome driver for 3D graphics. glxgears ran pretty smoothly which gave me some hope I could actually use this thing to run games.

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Long Live the Benevolent Dictator

By Doug Schaefer

The last few weeks I've been nose to the grindstone finishing up our first Wind River product release with a new p2-based installer. It's been a while since I've been involved in commercial development and, though it's been grueling and has taken me away from my CDT project lead duties, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and it looks like we'll be able to ship on time and with good quality, but maybe without all the bells and whistles I had hoped for when we started.

It's good to work in the corporate structure again too. If there are any decisions to be made, we have the processes and organization in place to make sure those decisions get made and that all the loose ends get tied up. It's the only way to succeed. You need that structure to make sure everyone is going in the same direction and has the same objectives.

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Why a good platform can't be free

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.

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A cool multi-platform CDT use case

By Doug Schaefer

I previously blogged about the VitualBox SDK and the capability it provides to build some really interesting emulation environments, 3D graphics being the one I'm most interested in at the moment. And this is something I'm seeing in the embedded industry a lot lately. Hardware is expensive. These boxes we have on our desks are very powerful and relatively pretty cheap. Being able to emulate hardware during the software development phase of a project gives the developer the ability to get his code up and running much earlier.

So looking at how I'd build an emulator for a Linux set-top box that had 3d graphic capabilities, it quickly became apparent again how the multi-platform capabilities of the CDT gives me an top class C/C++ IDE to do work on all of the components.

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Coming Live from Google Chrome

By Doug Schaefer

Well, it's live and I've downloaded it and am using it to write this blog entry. It's Google Chrome. It's a beta, but from what I've seen in the couple of minutes I've used it, it's delivering as promised. Very fast and smooth, even typing here. Better than Firefox? Seems like it, but maybe it's the chrome blinding me. And given the news volume about it, there's a lot of people speculating about what Google is trying to accomplish with this thing.

At any rate, if it is about making the Web the OS as we've been trying to do for centuries now, what does it mean to C++ application developers? How do they make their applications relevant in this new world? Is it all over? Do we throw away our C++ compilers and pick up a book on PHP?

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Google has their own browser!???

By Doug Schaefer

Apparently the word leaked on an unofficial Google blog site and they followed up with an "oops" official blog post. Either way, the word is out and the web browser "industry" is in for a shake up. Google is releasing their own web browser called Google Chrome. Apparently it includes pieces from Webkit (I'm guessing the browser part) and Firefox (I'm guessing the chrome part) and will be developed as an open source project.

The first beta will be released tomorrow (Tuesday). I've heard rumors but always dismissed them. Why would they do that when we have a handful of pretty good browsers already. I guess the rumors were true and given the beta comes out now, it's been in the works for a while.

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Android SDK goes beta

By Doug Schaefer

Well, if you follow the embedded industry even from a distance, the news that the Android SDK has gone beta is old news by now. I've been so busy p2-izing our upcoming Wind River products that I haven't had time to write here. Time to get my priorities straight :).

Any whoo, there's a lot of competition all of a sudden for mind share in the mobile Linux game. Android has been pretty quiet lately but they've clearly been busy beavers and a real Android-based device seems imminent, so it's time to take them seriously.

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LinuxHater, a touch of tough love

By Doug Schaefer

From now on, I defer all my opinions on the quality of the Linux desktop and the open source projects that work on it to this guy, the LinuxHater. I started reading this blog after I ran across this article on the 'Z' via the 'dot' written by a guy from Google. It really hits home what both of them have to say.

The hater shares some really honest opinions using some very colorful language (warning - if you're sensitive to that kind of thing) on everything from how hard it is for his grandmother to get into Linux, to how all the forking and duplication that's going on FOSS community is doing some serious harm to our ability to build up the Linux desktop to compete with Mac and Windows. It's a really funny read. And I have to agree with the Google guy. Given how much the hater knows about what he's writing about, he's really a Linux lover who desperately wants Linux to succeed but is loosing his cool in frustration.

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Android will be open source…eventually

By Doug Gaff

It's been a few months since the initial buzz of the Android SDK release, and the technology itself continues to look great. Ed Burnette recently posted a blog indicating Android will be 100% open source. In it he notes that Google says they fully intend to open up all of their code using appropriate open source licenses (including EPL!), but they're not yet ready because some of the API's aren't done. They're afraid of having to support bad API's forever. Yes, that sounds familiar, and of course the Eclipse response is: maybe if they opened up their API's, others could then help them evolve those API's to a point where the overall community was happy. We have provisional API's in Eclipse for exactly this reason. At a minimum, I wish Google would publish a timetable (gasp!) for getting this code opened up. Ed says Google will open (most) everything by the end of 2008. Please see the comments for details.

I want to revisit the two requests I made in my original post.

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Target Communication Framework (TCF)

By Martin Oberhuber

A year ago at EclipseCon, I've been asked a lot whether there wasn't a lightweight Open Source agent for resource-constrained communications with remote systems planned or available.

And now it's here - and much more! The Target Communication Framework (TCF) is not only an extendable agent, it's a whole protocol framework that has the potential to make target communications a lot easier. TCF is a new incubating component of the Eclipse Target Management Project, and its unique benefits include

• Transport-independent multiplexing of multiple services over a single protocol
• Ability to transparently add 3rd party value-adding services in the communication chain
• Auto-discovery and single setup of all target services.

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An Industry and Technology Revolution is on the Horizon

By Jason Whitmire

Limo, and in a slightly different way Android, have killed the standards-based approach to open source development in mobile. In the Linux world, creating an esoteric, theoretical application standard not based on market-driven code requires too much speculative investment without any clear mitigation of ROI risk for anyone to take up anymore. Indeed, the days of a bunch of representative techies flying to exotic locales to dream up the theoretical perfect system are over. It’s just too expensive to completely retool an entire stack without a known intrinsic return.

Because of the concentration in the mobile market (83% of handsets manufactured by five companies), when market leaders have invested in a stack, it is a standard whether certified by an arcane standards body or not.  The  Open Handset Alliance has created a de facto market standard not because a group of market leaders have adopted the standard, but because of Google’s overall singular market weight. The effect is the same (Trolltech and OpenMoko did the same thing that OHA did, and took it one step further by actually building a phone, but no one came running to embrace their reference designs because they lacked the market weight that Google has).

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Pointy Haired Boss: Open Source Software is Free!

By Doug Gaff

Today's Dilbert says it all.  There are far too many "free as in open, not free as in beer" blog posts for me to rehash this is great detail (wikipedia, my post).  But this comic reminds me of some simple truths:

• You can use open source software commercially or otherwise (subject to the license) and never contribute anything back.

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Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit

By Glenn Seiler

Today was the first day of the inaugural Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit. In case you don’t remember the Linux Foundation was formed as merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. The Collaboration Summit represents the first face-to-face meeting of the members of this new consortium. For many members that were previously very active in the OSDL there has been a lot of anticipation and anxiety about how the new organization will represent all the Linux community – those of us in the Device Software market as well as the mainstream Enterprise market.

I have to say this first day has been a very pleasant surprise. There have been some really good panel and keynote presentations. In particular the first panel included the prominent kernel maintainers and kernel developers including Andrew Morton, James Bottomley, Chris Wright, Ted Tso and Greg KH. Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, gave the keynote discussion.

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