Wind River Blog Network

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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Consolidate, Consolidate, Consolidate

By Mark Hermeling

Many telecom applications are actually built up from multiple smaller sub-applications, often running on their own server in a rack, ATCA or otherwise. These servers run on multi-core processors, depending on the age of the last refresh this could be a dual, quad core or more. This is of course nothing new, what's new is how virtualization can improve server utilization.

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Updates to our VxWorks MILS platform, including a new High Assurance Network Stack

By Bill Graham

This week we announced the latest update to our VxWorks MILS Platform, (for Multiple Independent Levels of Security) which includes a new High Assurance Network Stack (HANS) and guest OS support for Wind River Linux. In a previous post I discussed the growing importance of security in embedded systems. However, in so-called high assurance environments used by military and government organizations, security is an absolute requirement.

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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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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 3

By Bill Graham

In the third and final part of my interview with Professor Glauco Caurin we discuss multicore and virtualization and why they are working with us on their research projects.

Q: Are your students learning about multi-core processors  and programming? What about multi-OS systems including virtualization, i.e.  systems that have more than one OS on a single processor?

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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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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 2

By Bill Graham

In part two of my interview with Professor Glauco Caurin, we talk about some the research projects that they working on and how they are using VxWorks and other Wind River products:

Q: Tell us about the research projects you have make use of Wind River Products. Can you give us more detail on the Kanguera, the five fingers robot hand? Which of our software are you using? Where is it used and why?

We are using VxWorks now for some years with different platforms. More then 8 years ago we started the first research projects with the hardware funded by FAPESP using VxWorks donated by Wind River as the RTOS. The projects were related to the development of robot grippers and hands.

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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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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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VxWorks in Education: University of São Paulo, Brazil - Part 1

By Bill Graham

Wind River regularly contributes to education programs across the globe. One of these institutions is the University of São Paulo (USP) in Brazil. They are doing some amazing things with VxWorks and Wind River products play a big role in research and education in their engineering programs. In the next few posts I have transcribed an interview with Professor Glauco Caurin who teaches in robotics, mechatronics and mechanical engineering at USP's São Carlos Engineering School:

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Security is getting more critical every day in embedded software

By Bill Graham

A typical security discussion is usually about hackers getting into corporate IT systems or viruses on home desktops. Embedded systems have not always been the target for malicious attacks but times have changed. Embedded devices are more sophisticated and interconnected and in many cases connected to the Internet. This interconnection and Internet awareness has great benefits for expanding the ubiquity and usefulness of embedded devices in our lives. For example, a home environment monitoring system could monitor your house air quality with half a dozen wireless sensors that use a lower power local area network to your thermostat. Your thermostat could host a small web server on the Internet that lets you login and monitor and control your household temperature and humidity. Sounds great, right? It won't be that great if someone hacks into your system and turns the thermostat to 90 degrees and turns your house into a sauna! This is a trivial case but you can see how this could extend to a sheet metal press in a factory, elevators and escalators, or a chemical control valve in an oil refinery.

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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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What else is new in Tilcon Graphics Suite version 5.8?

By Bill Graham

Although adding OpenGL 3D support was an important part of the recent Tilcon 5.8 update, there's other things to talk about in the new release. It adds other new capabilities such as increased hardware, driver and target OS support, and image rotation capabilities.This is also the first release of the Tilcon Graphics Suite to include source code for customers wanting to tune the Tilcon GUI engine configuration and build.

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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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Bill-Of-Material

By Mark Hermeling

Bill-of-material is something that is important in many devices and I have argued before that virtualization can help with this. Say you have a medical device like an MRI scanner, it is not uncommon that this device has three processors that collaborate. One processor, often in a separate box like an industrial PC, runs MS Windows and is the operator interface, possibly with touch-screen GUI. This is where the results are displayed.

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Been to a hospital lately?

By Mark Hermeling

Well, I surely hope you haven't, hospitals are not my favorite places, they are a fertile ground for embedded systems though. Many of the devices in the hospital consist of an instrument part and a user interface (Human Machine Interface). The device could be an MRI scanner, or a a relatively simple blood analyzer. The Human Machine Interface on these devices control the instrument(s) provide feedback on the measurements and possibly interacts with a back office system.

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Tilcon in 3D

By Bill Graham

Today we announced our latest release of Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite, version 5.8. This is an important release for us for many reasons. One is this addition of OpenGL version 2.1 3D graphics to the Tilcon Graphics Suite (specifically for VxWorks runtime platforms). The need for 3D graphics is growing in embedded devices because User Interfaces (UI) are becoming more and more sophisticated. For medical devices this may mean 3D images of internal organs, joints, etc. For industrial devices it might mean 3D data representation, maps, or orthographic displays. For aerospace and defense, Heads Up Displays (HUD), radar and other display types do or will leverage 3D graphics. For consumer devices 3D graphics are already used for mobile gaming. 

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A Crisis of Complexity – Industry Report on Growing Challenges in Embedded Testing

By Paul Henderson

I’ve been talking a lot with embedded device companies around the world over the last few years and I am hearing growing concerns about software testing. I’ve mentioned several of these concerns in previous blogs. I wanted to get more quantifiable data and get some feedback that could help us shape our products and services to help. So I decided to run a survey to gather important data from our community.

The focus of this survey was to gain a detailed snapshot of how executives, development managers, QA and test team leaders and other involved staff currently view the embedded device software quality test landscape. Recent changes, new challenges and strategies for managing them were of particular interest.  So I fielded a four-part survey to individuals who work for embedded products companies. In total, nearly 35,000 individuals in North America were invited to participate in the survey via emails. 

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EGNOS Satellite Navigation System Safety Certification

By Paul Parkinson

In case you missed it, yesterday Wind River announced that VxWorks has been selected for the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), and has been chosen to run the Integrity Processing Facility (IPF) check set.

The IPF, developed and delivered by Logica, is the crucial element that validates the information broadcast by the satellites to safety-critical users such as aircraft in flight or ships navigating through narrow channels. This is essential, because satellite navigation systems alone do not provide sufficient positional accuracy to be used in safety-critical applications.

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What’s New in Wind River Test Management 3.3?

By Paul Henderson

Today we announced the latest version of Wind River Test Management, Release 3.3, our test automation system for monitoring, executing and managing embedded device software testing. Wind River Test Management lets teams optimally execute complex tests while dynamically gathering information from the production software under test as it is running, without requiring special pre-instrumented software builds. This approach allows teams to adopt new white-box test techniques that give testers visibility into the operation of the device and help them determine the thoroughness of the tests, quickly identify defects and performance bottlenecks, and focus efforts on sections of software that are most in need of testing.

Release 3.3 is a major new release that adds a number of significant new features. You can learn more and download several new whitepapers from www.windriver.com/products/test_management.

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Houston.... the Falcon has Flown!

By Mike Deliman

Last week something remarkable happened. I'm not talking about the UFO sighted over Brisbane (...or am I?)  Last week Spacex successfully orbited the first successful commercial attempt to launch such a device. Wind River is proud to be a part of this historic endeavor.

It's hard to convey how exciting this is.  This represents a HUGE step for mankind, a transition of the technology necessary for space exploration now being handled by commercial entities.  Something like this may be our fledgling answer for "what to do about Manned exploration now that ARES is cut".

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Wind River @ IBM Rational Innovate 2010

By Paul Henderson

Today marked the opening of the annual IBM Rational Software developer conference, this year called Innovate 2010, here in Orlando Florida.

The 4 day event is covering a range of topics on both IT and embedded systems software development and test lifecycle tools and technologies. Wind River has a presence on the exhibit floor and a number of conference tracks. The mood is very positive at this 13th conference. 4000 attendees are here, a 20% growth over 2009.

The show opened with several IBM executives led by Dr. Danny Sabbah, GM IBM Rational Software reviewing IBM's "Smarter Planet" strategy including "systems and software econometrics". Dr. Sabbah described how software innovations are now driving the world, particularly as related to intelligent products and services.  

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Multicore: Simplify by Understanding Key Use Cases

By Bill Graham

Wind River's CTO, Tomas Evensen gave a keynote at the Multicore Expo in San Jose entitled "Surviving the Software Avalanche: Simplifying Multicore". There certainly has been much discussion of multicore by many people (myself included) over the years but we are getting to a point now that we are seeing multicore use cases coalescing in the marketplace.

I think a lot of us learn better by example and when we see multicore used in a real customer use cases, we see the benefit and value much more.

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Radioactive Telepresence

By Mike Deliman

How timely!  A couple of months ago the discussion started - "will unmanned vehicles make a transition into civilian use".  I've been taking the stance that since we're talking vehicles - not just aircraft but all forms of non-stationary robot, that it is inevitable.  Even with aircraft I believe it is inevitable, though it may take a little longer for unmanned / automated aircraft to be certified for use in civilian airspace.

It would make sense that robots would be deployed for things that are either impossible for humans to do, or for things that are hazardous and dangerous.  On the impossible-for-humans side, quick return deep-dive missions in the ocean, and several-day long monitoring missions come to mind, as well as some interesting possibilities for telepresence tourism.  The hazardous side is easy to imagine - everything from maintenance of city infrastructures to handing toxic or radioactive substances would be fair game to use robots for, as well as underground mining.

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VxWorks: Helping Clean Up Radioactive Waste

By Bill Graham

Our customer, Groupe INTRA (Intervention Robotique sur Accident) in France has developed robotic vehicles for the remote analysis and clean up of radioactive sites. Groupe INTRA is chartered to respond to a nuclear accident within 24hrs for its member organizations. This is a very cool and interesting application of robotics and real-time control to protect operators from deadly radiation.

First there is ERASE ( External Reconnaissance, Assistance and Surveillance Robot) designed for rough terrain to analyze and transmit details of the accident site back to operators. ERASE and can be controlled form up to 10km away from the site.

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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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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 of what may have been happening when the error occurred.

Producing a linker map is fairly easy.  Most linkers include command line options to produce a map.  This works fine and is very clear when used from a command line.  But things can get a little confusing from within an integrated gui environment.

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