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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A Better way to Connect: TCF and Simics

By Jakob Engblom

How do you actually connect an integrated development environment or a debugger to a target system? This question is more complicated than it might seem to the uninitiated outsider. Traditionally, a range of protocols have been used to connect the development host to a target, most of them vendor-proprietary, and often specialized for a particular purpose (such as debug, downloading code, or uploading profile data). However, there is a better alternative available today, the open-source TCF, Target Connection Framework. The TCF is much more than a debugger connection.  Based on decades of industry experience as to what you actually need to do with a target, TCF combines everything on a single connection: analysis, testing, configuration, control, provisioning, inspection, tracing, debugging, and anything else you might think of. Simics is making good use of TCF to simplify the connection between the Simics runtime engine and the Simics Eclipse-based GUI. In this blog post, I will go into how TCF is used with Simics and what it has enabled us to do that would have been very difficult without the TCF.

First, we need a little background on TCF itself. The TCF is a project in Eclipse, with contributions from Wind River, Xilinx, and others. The TCF protocol is service-based, and each target exposes the services that it supports to the host. The host can then activate the appropriate functionality, based on what the target reports. In this way, there is no need for the host to know very much about the target a priori, as all its capabilites are reported dynamically after a connection has been setup.

Anyway, on to Simics and TCF. Given what TCF is, how did we use it with Simics?

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Simulation is a competitive advantage!

By Michel Genard

The American general election is over. Pundits providing postmortem analysis will continue to generate a ton of studies. Let’s examine one aspect of the election that has already generated some interesting ink. This article in Time Magazine mentions how analytic teams tried to predict election results, even running as many as 66,000 simulations night after night. The Obama campaign managed to create hundreds of models (likely electors) and run election simulations each day to define and validate the “design” of the path to victory. Each morning, after looking at simulation results they would adjust the campaign. This process is recognized as a competitive advantage. Let’s now map this phenomenon to embedded software development. 

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 3: Mapping the Tools to Activities

By Bill Graham

In the previous posts in this series, Part 1: Automation is the Key and Part 2: Security Improvement and the Software Development Lifecycle, I talked about the connection between the typical embedded device development process and the 5+1 improvement framework for embedded security.  Figure 1 is an illustration of this connection (and discussed in more detail in a previous post). 

 

Figure 1: Mapping the security improvement framework and the device software lifecycle

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Test Management 5.0: Extending testing to Android, security and beyond

By Ido Sarig

Today we announced the latest  version of Wind River Test Management, which takes software test optimization to the next level. 

With this release, we have unified our testing solutions for VxWorks, Linux and Android under one umbrella. All the capabilities of Wind River Framework for Automated Software Testing (FAST), our solution for Android compatibility testing, have now been merged into Wind River Test Management. This includes all the ready-to-run test assets, more than 26,000 tests in all, which are now available as Wind River Test Management for Android, with support for the latest version of Android  – Jelly Bean – already available!

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Systematically Exposing OS Kernel Races – An Interview with Ben Blum

By Jakob Engblom

Full-system simulators like Simics provide unparalleled insight into what is going on in a target system. Indeed, better insight is one of the main features of simulation that we get regardless of what we simulate and how. In addition, if we want to, we can also exert control over the target system to make it take different execution paths than it otherwise would. Earlier this year, Ben Blum at Carnegie-Mellon University  CMU presented a Master’s thesis that provides a very good example of just what can be achieved by combing the insight and control of a simulator with intelligence and domain knowledge. The system is called Landslide, and it is used to expose race conditions inside of operating-system kernels.

Landslide systematically explores the possible execution paths of the kernel in order to provoke latent bugs that might only happen very rarely in actual use of the operating system – but as we all know, such glitches are the ones that tend to be found by customers in critical situations and force engineering to spend months in reproduction attempts.

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 2: Security Improvement and the Software Development Lifecycle

By Bill Graham

In many of my previous posts, I’ve discussed Wind River's 5+1 step improvement framework for embedded device security. By design, it’s meant to complement the software development lifecycle (SDLC) that our customers are using – the stages or phases how they define them and the processes they follow. It’s important for a discussion on tools to put them in the context of the SDLC to see where they apply and how they are useful beyond just the coding stage.

Figure 1 shows the relationship between the SDLC and our security improvement framework. The phase names and number of phases may change from customer to customer but the general idea remains the same. It’s important to note that the improvement framework is equally compatible with Microsoft’s Secure Design Lifecycle that is gaining traction amongst embedded developers too.

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The Role of Tools in Improving Embedded Software Security / Part 1: Automation is the Key

By Bill Graham

Security Vulnerabilities are Expensive

Shipping security vulnerabilities in a finished product and having them discovered or worse, exploited, is a very expensive proposition for embedded device vendors. As I’ve discussed in an earlier post, security defects are much more expensive to patch and fix the later they are discovered. If you’re lucky to catch a vulnerability during development, you can likely save your company and project thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, security vulnerabilities are expensive and costly not only in dollars but in reputation and customer satisfaction.

On average, a vendor loses around 0.6 percent value in stock price when a vulnerability is reported. This is equivalent to a loss in market capitalization values of $0.86 billion per vulnerability announcement.  --Telang & Wattal 2007

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Open source in Medical Devices: Part of the Cure or Part of the Disease?

By Ido Sarig

The Economist recently published a very interesting article on the merits of open source in medical device development, which raises some questions and sparks an important discussion. 

In general, it is more common to see open source adoption in non-regulated industries. However, we are seeing it more and more in regulated industries primarily because it encourages rapid innovation at far lower costs.  That said, it is important to caution those in the regulated industries (aerospace & defense, medical, industrial automation, energy, automotive) towards embracing open source concepts without investing in lifecycle management tools to support the building of safe and effective devices.  [Proprietary software on the other hand, is a better fit for companies that design devices in environments where changes are few and far in between. Proprietary software also enables better control of the ecosystem, the lower the stack you go.]

As the Economist puts it, “exposing a design results in safe products.”  Maybe…Designing a device or ecosystem with safety in mind, results in safer products, hence the need for “design for safety.”  The FDA mandates a safe and effective design for any devices that gets approved in the US market -- this requires companies to have better control of their ecosystem.  Done proactively, this is an efficient method for product development; however, done reactively, companies incur a lot of costs and overheads trying to make open source fit.

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Diab Compiler Adding Support for new Infineon TriCore AURIX Microcontrollers

By Graham Morphew

Infineon Technologies recently announced their next generation family of 32-bit TriCore™ microcontrollers for automotive applications.  The new architecture is called AURIX™ (AUtomotive Realtime Integrated neXt generation architecture) and it supports multi-core architectures of up to three independent TriCore CPUs.  The feature set of this new AURIX family is a perfect match for powertrain applications, electric vehicles as well as steering, braking, airbag and advanced driver assistance systems.  The Diab Compiler is used in these same applications because it meets the extreme code optimization needs of these types of applications as developers try to maximize performance within the tight memory constraints of a microcontroller’s on-chip memories.  It is this alignment of target markets that brought Wind River and Infineon together to form a partnership to to ensure the Diab Compiler is highly optimized for TriCore, so that our joint customers can meet the demanding specifications of their OEM customers.

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Detecting security problems – using static analysis to catch them early and less expensively

By Bill Graham

In my previous post I discussed the potential benefits in quality and costs that static analysis brings to software development. In addition to common coding errors, many of the bugs found by static analysis are potential security defects as well.  Buffer overflow, OS command injection, unrestricted string format and integer overflows are among the top 25 most dangerous security coding defects (according to the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWS) from the MITRE organization). These types of defects are common in C and C++ and are dangerous to correct operation in general but also pose significant security threats – often because the right exploit can lead to arbitrary code execution on the target. Once an attacker can execute code on your device, they can gain complete control, which might include reflashing the firmware, installing malware or rewriting the command and control software.

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Using Static Analysis to Improve Product Quality, Earlier and Cheaper

By Bill Graham

Fixing bugs is expensive. Fixing bugs is more expensive the later you leave them, in fact, its been shown to cost a magnitude higher with each major phase of development. The famous defect cost chart from Capers Jones shows the cost of a bug going from $25 at the coding phase to $16,000 in development.  Not only that, but most of the bugs are introduced into the system at this stage yet very little of them are found. Logic says we should fix them earlier to save money.

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Introducing Performance Studio

By Emeka Nwafor

What is Performance Studio? Is it:

1. Some kind of hair product

2. A new "clinic" for MLB players

3. Full name: : Wind River Linux Performance Studio for Intel® Architecture; a new add-on product for Wind River Linux that helps you get the most performance out of your embedded Linux device software running on Intel hardware 

If you correctly answered "3", give yourself a round of applause.

Our portfolio of development solutions have long addressed a broad set of embedded device development concerns in the areas of system definition, bring-up, software construction, integration & test, and maintaining and retro-fitting embedded device software and hardware. Now, with the introduction of Performance Studio, we not only have the broad development solutions portfolio but also further extend it with capabilities that enable us to go deeper into the platform and obtain the best performance out of embedded Linux software running on Intel® Core™, Xeon™, and Atom™ processors. 

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Hacking Insulin Pumps for Fun and Profit

By Ido Sarig

Last month, I had the opportunity to take part in the Amphion Medical Forum in Minneapolis, where the theme was security challenges facing Medical devices. Amphion is a forum that brings together thought leaders from academia, business, government and technology, which was founded to provide a medium for these visionaries to define solutions to some of the issues, such as safety and security, which affect the new interconnected economy, the “internet of things”.

I participated in a panel that discussed the challenges and risks posted by the latest generation of wireless medical devices, and how proper Fuzz Testing, such as the capability offered by Wind River Test Management in conjunction with our partner Codenomicon, can help alleviate some of that risk.

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A Medical Device Platform: Beyond the Operating System

By Bill Graham

With the release of the new Wind River Platform for Medical Devices it's a good time to point out the breadth of products and services that make up a modern embedded solution suite. In fact, our medical solutions go well beyond the products that make up the Platform. The Platform for Medical Devices provides the main components: VxWorks RTOS, middleware, networking, development tools and BSPs.

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Test Management 4.0: Reduce Risk by Understanding the Impact of Change

By Ido Sarig

Big day today, we just announced the release of our latest version of Wind River Test Management, WRTM 4.0, the culmination of several years of hard work - kudos to our engineering team!

In the coming weeks, I will be covering many of the new features of WRTM 4.0 in detail in a series of separate posts, but today I wanted to give you an overview of some of the new things you can look forward to.

I’ll start by sharing a quote from Wind River customer GE Healthcare on how Test Management is helping their business -- a real testament to the value that Test Management delivers.

"Wind River Test Management has tremendously helped us improve the productivity of our firmware testing team, significantly reducing the overall development cycle time. And although we already had more than 20 tools as part of our test and development process, test plans and test results were still mostly paper based.  Wind River Test Management easily integrates with our existing solutions, such as HP Quality Center, to provide a complete automated regression testing suite running tests remotely on the target and collecting valuable metrics for tracking test progress and software quality. GE Healthcare operates on a ‘zero defects’ policy and Wind River helps ensure that this policy is met much faster than before."

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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. 

 

Autonomy and Robotic Advancement

By Mike Deliman

A few months ago at the Robotics Virtual Trade Show, in my presentation I spoke about the evolution of robotic systems.  One thing I predicted was as time goes on, robots will become more independent and autonomous, performing more of the work humans and mainframe-style systems have traditionally performed.  

Among the robots I talked about were robots similar to NASA's 
Stardust Spacecraft  Stardust is currently on course for a Valentine's Day rendezvous with Comet Temple-1.  Stardust includes a package that performs autonomous navigation, d to help keep the craft on it's flight path with reduced intrusion from ground-based systems.  Since Stardust is so far out from earth, there is significant delay in round-trip communications.  Stardust is able to detect problems in trajectory and perform course correction maneuvers on its own.

Last week, Northrop Grumman had  first-flight for an evolution in Un-maned Aerial Vehicles.  The 
X47B UCAS   is an autonomous unmanned flight system.  It is not a wireless-joystick system.  It flies itself, taking off, figuring a course to it's way points, landing.  Without human intervention.

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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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It's a Beautiful Day

By Emeka Nwafor

I have been totally absorbed by the media coverage of the incredible rescue of the thirty-three Chilean miners that were trapped about a kilometer below the earth's surface for months. The images of jubilation as "Super Mario" and the other miners exited the pod will be imprinted in our minds forever. A real Feel Good Story.

Many thanks to the scientists, engineers, and rescue specialists from across the planet for playing their part in bringing up the 33 miners and 4 rescue workers and for making this A Beautiful Day.

Between reports of the rescue of the individual Chilean miners, CNN's report on the "Best Jobs in America" caught my attention, my curiousity, and briefly diverted my focus from the rescue (and my day job). Of the top-100 jobs, I was pleasantly surprised to see that "Software Architect" ranked at the top - #1 in America. "Product Management Director" and "Software Engineering/Development Director" were in the top-20 - this was a pleasant but credible surprise. "Telecommunications Network Engineer", "Test Software Development Engineer", "R&D Manager", and "Systems Engineer" were all in the top-50. Very interesting considering that these rankings are based on criteria like compensation, job growth, and quality of life.

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Physical or Virtual

By Jakob Engblom

When you explain what a virtual platform or full-system simulation solution like Wind River Simics is, a key part is that it runs the same software as a physical board or physical system. This does capture the core of the idea - but it does not mean that the virtual platform is only "just like the real thing".

Comparing virtual and physical systems is like comparing apples and apples, not apples and oranges: while apples are mostly interchangeable, they is certainly variation between them. Some apples are best for eating, some are better for making sauce, some are pie material, and some are best for fermenting cider. The type you select depends on what you want to cook. The difference between physical and virtual hardware is similar: they can be used as replacements for each other to some extent, but the connoisseur can make much better use of both by looking at the differences.

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Intuitive & Efficient Debug of Multi-core Systems

By Brian Finkel

I reflect on a recent visit with my 84-year old Aunt Honey. As you might expect, she is not an avid cell phone user. She wanted help entering contacts into her phone. She has a basic phone so we had to enter text using the “9-up” keypad. Her objective is to make phone calls by selecting someone’s name instead of typing the telephone number.   

The event had me thinking about the way we used to make telephone calls – using an address book or a phone list and then typing in the number. In my youth, things weren’t so bad – everyone lived in the same town – with the same area code and only a few prefixes. For each friend you only had to remember the 4 digits and perhaps which prefix to use. Fast forward a few years and with the advent of cell phones, IP telephony, new area codes, and geographically-dispersed friends and family – you now need to remember 10 digits. 10 digits is beyond most people’s working memory (which is typically 7 digits). Address books and phone lists were required. 

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A Few Words About the Future

By Amit Nandi

I recently started reading a book called “I Live in the Future & Here’s How It Works” by Nick Bilton.  I got interested in the book after reading an excerpt online at the New York Times, where Bilton is the lead writer for their technology blog. This is where my life started imitating art.

While I was waiting for the e-book to download, I read on to the second half of the excerpt. Bilton describes a nifty rule he calls “1, 2, 10”; numbers that describe the distance between your eyes, the screen of a mobile device, computer screen and television screen, respectively.  He asserts that content will eventually follow us from screen to screen and place to place. While this exact future hasn’t happened yet, a reasonable facsimile of it was taking place in a race between the downloading of his book both on my computer and my iPod touch. Having the content accessible on a large monitor during the day and at bedtime is really handy when you’re writing to a deadline.

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Variable and Deterministic

By Jakob Engblom

A virtual platform like Wind River Simics is generally designed to be deterministic. Determinism brings a host of benefits to users (repeatability of bugs, reverse execution, bug transportation, etc.), but is also easily misunderstood. Quite often, users fear that they will lose an important "feature" of a physical machine - its built-in variation across runs of the same software. If the virtual platform is deterministic, surely it will not expose all the different ways a program can run that you get on a random physical machine? Yes it can.

There is a huge difference between the repeatable determinism of a virtual machine and completely invariant, predictable, predetermined behavior.

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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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Wind River and IBM Attack Software Quality

By Paul Henderson

As I've mentioned before, we've been working with IBM Rational for some time around quality management automation. Both companies see the skyrocketing software content and architectural complexity in the embedded device market as creating a tipping point where companies will not be able to continue with business as usual.

Product development teams will need to take a more managed and automated approach to quality that spans across the lifecycle and access into the devices under test. This is particularly true in markets that require strict adherance to standards and compliance regulations.

We put together a joint whitepaper on this subject downloadable from here. And we are also having a joint web seminar next week on Tuesday Aug 31 at 2pm EDT. You can register for this event here.

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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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Test Driven Development Meets Continuous Integration

By Paul Henderson

In my last posting I mentioned I'd be running a webinar with James Grenning on Agile testing. James is a recognized expert and frequent speaker on the topic of software development and one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

We talked about the case for agility where today's embedded software projects are inevitably faced with changing requirements and market conditions that cause unplanned, mid-course corrections. The result is what went in is often not what was expected to come out. Testing folks are the tail trying to wag the dog as they try to test in quality at the end of the project.

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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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