Wind River Blog Network

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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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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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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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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Shiny Old Hardware

By Jakob Engblom

Normally when people are introduced to virtual platforms or full-system simulators like Wind River Simics, they jump at the ability to support software development before the hardware arrives. This is certainly an exciting prospect, as we all like shiny new things. What is often not as obvious is the extensive use of virtual platforms to support old, aging, and obsolete hardware.

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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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Inadequate Management Visibility into Quality is Eroding Confidence

By Paul Henderson

Here’s the next installment in my series on 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 how they measure software quality today, the metrics most often cited by survey respondents were reactive in nature such as tracking customer-reported failures and open defects rather than metrics that can help them prevent defects.

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Compressed Schedules Driving Shorter Testing & Defect Resolution Requirements

By Paul Henderson

Today I'm continuing my series on our embedded device software industry 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.comand I will send it to you.

In part 2 of the survey we asked about schedule compression and what affect that was having on the device testing cycle. A majority of survey participants reported that market conditions have forced them to shorten their development schedules by as much as 18 months.

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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 I'll probably be too busy talking to customer to attend sessions, which is a good problem to have of course.

I am hosting a 4 hour session (with several of my colleagues) on Multicore Demystified on Tuesday afternoon 2.30-7pm (there will be refresments!) in the Hilton Plaza Room. Do stop by either the session, or our booth at Multicore Expo for a chat if you want to brain storm about your next generation devices.

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VxWorks Helping to Bring LTE Down Under

By Bill Graham

Our customer, Huawei, recently announced they have been chosen to deploy Australia's first LTE network. This is great news because Huawei's LTE base stations are built using VxWorks - the VxWorks Platform for Networking Equipment to be exact.

It's also great news because we are starting to see the fruits of our customers' efforts come to reality and it stands as a validation of our investment in next generation networks. Moreover, this is the latest in a set of successes we've had with VxWorks in the networking space.

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Domesticated Robotics?

By Mike Deliman

A discussion about robotics was started up in an online discussion forum.  A question was posed to the group:

Will unmanned vehicles eventually see duty in civilian applications?

Technology for unmanned military vehicles may eventually trickle down to commercial applications on Main Street. In the near future, autonomous vehicles will be used to deliver packages, collect garbage and fill potholes. http://bit.ly/bSrqfx

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Blog Article: Boundaries are Disappearing

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.

This post by George Zimmerman talks about how integration of technologies leads to inflection points in the adoption of new technology.

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Article: Virtualization for Network-based Multicore Telecommunication systems – System Requirements

By Mark Hermeling

Found a great article discussing the needs of virtualization in the telecom space. The blog posting provides a good overview of technical capabilities that are needed for a virtualization layer in the multicore space.

I agree with many of the points that the author brings forward: Isolation, separation, performance (both algorithmic as well as I/O), size, stability, inter-VM communication, flexibility. Many of these attributes are what differentiate an embedded hypervisor from IT-level hypervisors.

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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, 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.

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Wi-Fi Direct Permeating Personal Area Networking

By Nikhil Chauhan

Did you hear it?

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.

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Talk Between Devices

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.

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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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Multicore and Unicore Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

Sometimes I get a chance to browse the web a bit, trying to find interesting tidbits. I ran into the following post from Hollis Blanchard. Hollis is an active participant in the world of virtualization, particularly on the Power architecture.

Hollis makes a point that I have been trying to get out as well: virtualization is clearly technology to look into when you are building multicore systems, but also when you are building unicore systems.

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Carrier Grade Starts with Finding and Fixing Software Defects Before Deployment

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.

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Green Linux and Green Telecom – Where do they intersect?

By Glenn Seiler

Green, green, everything is green. It is spring now, the hills around Silicon Valley are bright and green and everything in the yard is in full bloom. Even in our jobs everything is green in these times. You can’t watch TV or listen to the news or read a press release without hearing about Green. And of course this is all for very good reasons – even if we were in a good economy we would still have to start taking measures to reduce the energy we consume and conserve power and resources.

You may have heard a lot about Green Telecom, and like many of today’s catch phrases it can mean a lot of different things. One aspect of Green Telecom that you read a lot about is the use of alternative energy to drive base stations and wireless infrastructure, especially in emerging nations. There is a great video from Ericsson on YouTube that discusses this, and that is part of a larger sequence of videos on Green Telecom. They describe using solar energy and bio-fuels in "off-grid" countries and how people who only make a few dollars a week are willing to spend some of that money to have communication services available.

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