Tips & Tricks | Wind River Blog

Leaders and Followers

By Mark Hermeling Events such as ESC in San Jose this week are a great way to talk to a lot of customers in a very short timespan. Hence, a great place to be for a product manager like myself. The conversations show a clear difference between leaders in multicore adoption and followers of that adoption.The discussions with the followers…

So, What Does _Your_ Software Architecture Look Like?

By Mark Hermeling Customers often ask me in my opinion as to what their path to multi-core should be. Invariably I ask them two things. 1) Describe your current hardware architecture, your next hardware architecture and what your hardware architecture will look like in 3 years; 2) Describe your current software architecture and any plans you have to evolve it.…

ESC Silicon Valley

By Mark Hermeling Looking forward to my trip to ESC Sillicon Valley next week. It is promising to be a busy show, especially since ESC is now combined with the Multicore expo. I just leafed through the agenda (in the form of a Nxtbook) and found a large number of sessions that I want to attend, experience show though that…

Quit Bugging Me: Making Maps

By Mike Deliman A tool commonly used in embedded debugging is a linker map - a map of where all the symbols are in the runtime image. These maps are useful as they turn raw addresses reported by some exception stubs (etc) into offsets into the data or text (program routines) in the computer's RAM. They give you an idea…

Quit Bugging Me: Another Surprise NaN!

By Mike Deliman An Earlier QBM, "Surprise NAN" covered how floating point computations may become corrupted from unexpected sources. Today's Quit Bugging Me is about... another Surpise! NAN! An application runs with several tasks. One task, which computes a set of floating point values, periodically comes up with bad values, and sometimes the name becomes corrupted. Continue Reading >>

Virtualization and Fault Handling

By Mark Hermeling In several of my previous posts I have written about the fact that embedded virtualization has low overhead, maintains determinism and all that good stuff. I have also written about some of the benefits of virtualization due to partitioning, scalability and such. However, there is one aspect of virtualization that gets little 'air time' and that is the…

A Sea of Cores, Now What?

By Mark Hermeling A great number of cores gives more processing power, but this power needs to be harnessed. The easiest way to control a sea of cores is of course to run a single operating system over this sea in a Symmetric MultiProcessing mode (SMP). Most modern operating systems support this (which includes Wind River Linux and VxWorks of…

Quit Bugging Me: Revalidated

By Mike Deliman One day, I get this phone call. "We're working with the system, we see the calls that update the exception handlers early on - connecting the clock routines, etc. Then not very much farther on we see the system has run past where tasking should be running but it's not. When we check, we're not getting any…

Article: Multi-Core Slow Down

By Mark Hermeling An interesting article by Dan Woods on Multi-core slowdown. The article tries to temper people's expectations with regards to mArticle: Multi-Core Slow Downulticore. The basic argument goes: A multicore processor has more raw processing power, but it requires the software load that runs on top of that processor to be able to use those cores, if not,…

Primary Multicore Software Configurations

By Mark Hermeling Many people ask the question as to what the best approach would be for them to go to multicore and/or virtualization. This is a great question to start a discussion as there is not a single silver bullet. I meant to post a quick diagram on the different multicore configurations before, but life has been busy since…