Wind River Blog Network

BMW wants to go open

By Doug Schaefer

Ian Skerrett, our fine director of Marketing at the Eclipse Foundation, pointed out this article from MotorAuthority.com. BMW apparently is feeling out the market to see if there is an appetite by tier one manufacturers to work together on an open source stack for in-car infotainment systems.

The concept BMW has in mind reminds me a lot of Google's Android who just recently released all the source to the Android platform for cell phones. Android is Google's attempt to open up the software stack for much the same reason BMW wants it for automotive, to ensure leading edge software applications can be built for those platforms with minimal obstacles. We'll see how well the master plan works, but I like the concept.

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Open Source Handhelds

By Doug Schaefer

Quite a while ago now I posted about the open source gaming device from Korea know as the GP2X. At the end of the day, it ended up with a storied history and while I love the concept of a handheld mobile device for which you can write your own applications, their execution as a company out side of Korea wasn't that great and only a distributor in the UK was able to make any kind of splash with it.

At any rate, I found on Slashdot that they have announced a new generation of the product called the Wiz. The links lead you to the UK site and a big JPEG of the brochure in English. The specs look pretty good, ARM9 processor at 533MHz, 3D accelerated graphics, Linux of course, and support for audio and video making it a pretty cool multimedia gaming machine, for which you can write your own applications. And hopefully they'll be a bit more successful at delivering it than the last one.

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nEUROn UCAV programme

By Paul Parkinson

In case you missed the news, the article 'COTS for unmanned flights' (Electronic Product Design, 22nd April 2008) describes how the nEUROn UCAV programme (Airforce Technology) has standardized on the VxWorks 653 RTOS.

nEUROn is a technology demonstrator programme involving five European companies, which in itself is not unusual, but it does have a significant objective - to demonstrate the maturity of technologies by producing modular safety-critical avionics systems running on COTS-based on-board computers. The development of avionics systems for a UCAV are in some ways even more challenging than for a military fast jet, given that it will provide a similar level of capability, but yet has less Space, Weight and Power (SWaP) available. This is one of the driving factors behind the ARINC 653 software architecture, enabling multiple applications to be hosted on a common computing platform (see 'ARINC 653 software weighs less' for background).

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Software wants to be free…

By Doug Gaff

…to run on the hardware of your choice. Or so Psystar wants you to believe about the Leopard OS. In case you haven't been following this story, Psystar has created a Mac computer clone and is selling them pre-installed with Leopard (or Ubuntu, XP, Vista, or nothing). It's called an Open Computer. According to Apple, this is a violation of Leopard's EULA. I don't use a Mac, and while I am occasionally wowed by these bright and shiny objects, I prefer to be voluntarily water-boarded by Vista. So this particular offer doesn't appeal to me.

However, I do find it both comical and a little scary. In the Operating System space, be it host OS's or real-time OS's, the name of the game is running on as many platforms as your customers can dream up. Wind River's operating systems have been doing this from the beginning. Like many others, we affectionately call this our "Matrix of Pain". PC vendors are no exception, of course. In fact, many of the critical problems people run into with Vista and Linux have to do with hardware driver problems (or non-existence) and not the OS's themselves. Apple is certainly lucky to have such a small set of platforms to support.

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We don't need another Java dialect. What we need is expertise.

By Franco Gasperoni, AdaCore

A group of experts is investigating the creation of a Java variant for safety-critical systems that can undergo DO-178B certification. This ongoing effort finds its roots in the work on the real-time specification for Java that started in December 1998.

The question is: What problem does this effort try to solve?

The answer is not technology. There are many technical challenges to create a Java derivative suitable for the development of safety-critical software. These challenges make this task interesting for a group of experts. Yet, there is no technical need for another programming language in the safety-critical domain. Indeed today there are plenty of safety-critical systems developed using a plethora of technologies and successfully programmed in Ada 83/Ada 95 and C/C++.

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Managing Software Obsolescence

By Paul Parkinson

Yesterday, I attended the Component Obsolescence Group (COG) quarterly meeting, which was held at the Imperial War Museum, Duxford.  I was standing in for my colleague Alex Wilson, who wasn't able to attend, and I gave his presentation 'Managing Software Obsolescence through Standards.'

The presentation was about how open standards and software abstraction can provide isolation from underlying hardware architectures, and can assist processor architecture migration as part of a technology refresh cycle. This is important in many A&D programmes, given in the increasing in-service lifetimes of some systems, but the principle also applies to other vertical markets too. The presentation also highlighted how the RTCA/DO-297 standard provides guidance on the development of Integrated Modular Avionics (IMA) platforms to enable modular and incremental certification of safety-critical systems, but this actually provides a side-benefit which can help address obsolescence. This is because it advocates a role-based approach, and advocates separation of the configuration data based on role and activities.

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Drive by Ethernet?

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.

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The Check is in the Mail, Do No Evil and Other Matters of Trust

By Jason Whitmire

All will agree that mobile Linux suffers from fragmentation today, and that fragmentation
•    creates significant challenges to Linux adoption in mobile phones (lack of interoperability et. al.) 
•    presents barriers to innovation
•    increases the carrier cost to Linux terminal deployment.

For Linux to succeed in the mobile market, we need to minimize fragmentation and its resulting incompatibility.  In the early days of the PC revolution, this type of incompatibility was similarly rampant, and the Wintel monopoly provided the standard.  More importantly, the Wintel monopoly created the incentive to rally around the standard. 

But suggesting that the industry set up Google as the mobile Linux gatekeeper, including issuing all the keys to the various feature phone middleware/applications framework kingdoms (which account for about 90% of all phones deployed today), to take on the monumental role of software guardian for mobile Linux, is possibly antithetical to the open source movement, regardless of Google’s motto.  And perhaps this is not the role that Google ultimately seeks in the mobile market.  Indeed, there are multiple thrusts to Google’s mobile terminal strategy, all of which are underpinned by the principle of radically improving the efficiency and experience of the end-user’s mobile internet time.

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Open Interfaces Needed

By Doug Gaff

Customers demand choice, choice drives competition, and competition drives innovation and lowered cost.   That's a Free Market Economy, right?

Well, no economic or political system is completely pure. Take my iPod for example. iPod's are small, pretty, and surprisingly reliable from a software perspective. But once you buy one, you're locked into "accessory monopoly." Not an Apple accessory monopoly exactly, but a monopoly on the iPod hardware interface itself. I have an Alpine iPod deck with a digital interface in my car, an Onkyo iPod dock on my home stereo, and a couple of iPod chargers. All of these plug into the digital interface on the bottom of the iPod. The interface is nice. It provides digital extraction of MP3 files so that decoding can be done by external A/V equipment. It provides high-quality line-level output for an external analog interface. It provides the ability to extract the music list for external display (on my TV or my Alpine's screen). It's also proprietary.

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Military Aerospace & Electronics Show

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!

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