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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“Good” Android

By Chris Buerger

Following a recent trip to China, I acquired an Android tablet running Release 1.6 (Donut). Total retail price: $90. Unlike an iPad, it is both 'Designed and Made in China.' Running on an ARM platform and containing an 802.11 interface, SD card slot and a touch screen, it is actually a reasonably speedy experience. However, that is where the positive news ends.

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Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints

By Jakob Engblom

I have a paper about "Transporting Bugs with Checkpoints" to be presented at the S4D (System, Software, SoC and Silicon Debug) conference in Southampton, UK, on September 15 and 16, 2010. The core concept presented is to leverage Wind River Simics checkpointing to capture and move a bug from the bug reporter to the responsible developer. It is a fairly simple idea, but getting it to work efficiently does require that some things are done right.

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Available Now: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

Check this site out! http://developer.windriver.com.

Our initiative to create a resource for our Linux users to connect with others is now a reality! This project focuses on encouraging interactions between Wind River users, Wind River engineers, and embedded Linux community experts.

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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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Interview with Girish Venkatasubramanian

By Jakob Engblom

After my blog post on Academic Simics earlier this Summer, I got a very nice reply from Girish Venkatasubramanian of UFL. Turned out that he and his group was doing some really interesting and exciting stuff with Simics, researching into Hypervisor architectures and hardware support. Having been a PhD student myself, I can certainly appreciate the excitement and fun of working in that field. We ended up doing a virtual interview, which I am happy to present here.

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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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Type 1 versus Type 2 Hypervisors

By Mark Hermeling

I have always found the difference between Type 1 vs Type 2 hypervisors rather uninteresting. In short, a type-1 hypervisor is a hypervisor that has direct access to the hardware, where a type-2 hypervisor executes inside an operating system. Most hypervisors are type-1 hypervisors, including IT hypervisors such as VMWare, Xen, KVM and such. Type-2 hypervisors are applications like VMWare Workstation (or Fusion), Parallels, .... The distinction between type-1 versus type-2 is really not as useful as most people think. There is a good blog article by Anthony Liguori that describes this as well, complete with references, the article is a bit old, but still correct.

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Coming Next Week: Wind River Developer Community for Linux!

By Kay Stanley

We have been busy creating a new resource for our Linux users to connect with others! One of the most high profile and exciting initiatives that I've been tasked with, is to partner with other Wind River staff, and create a place for Linux users of all kinds to come together. We've heard what our customers have been asking for and they were the key drivers behind this project:

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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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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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Freescale on Multi-core and Virtualization

By Mark Hermeling

Two good blog posts from some of my colleagues at Freescale. One on Heading Into Hyperspace: Hypervisor and Multi-core design by Jim Trudeau and one by Rob Oshana on the Top 3 Keys to Multi-core software development. Jim talks about the multi-core aspects mostly from Freescale's P4080 perspective, an elegant, powerful and very popular processor in the networking space. The P4080 has not only many processors, it is truly designed for multicore with multiple peripherals (multiple PCI hosts) and multiple memory controllers for example to reduce contention.

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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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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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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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Agile Testing for Embedded Devices

By Paul Henderson

I am running a Web seminar on agile testing with James Grenning. James is a recognized expert and frequent speaker on the topic of software development. Founder of Renaissance Software Consulting, he provides training, coaching, and consulting to corporate and government clients worldwide. James is one of the original authors of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and is presently leading efforts to introduce Agile development practices to the challenging world of embedded systems.

Iterative software development methods like Agile are being adopted by many software and information technology (IT) organizations across the industry. Quick design-develop-test cycles let teams respond better to changing requirements while providing timely feedback on features and quality. Agile methods help companies produce higher-quality software faster and at lower costs.

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Creating Success For Your Android Device (a.k.a lessons learned from the iPhone 4)

By Chris Buerger

The avalanche of customer issues following the launch of Apple’s latest iPhone device illustrates a lesson that is not only eternally true for any consumer electronics device, but especially impactful for a highly subsidized mobile phone. The lesson is simple – test your device and software thoroughly or pay a high price. A high price in RMA costs, brand value, customer switching costs, emergency engineering expense as well as a surge in costs for customer relationship management.  

Today, we at Wind River are taking the wraps off a brand-new solution called Wind River FAST (Framework for Automated Software Test) for Android to determine the functional readiness, stability, performance and compliance of devices running the Android stack. 

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Academic Simics

By Jakob Engblom

Simics has a long history of university usage. Simics grew out of research at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SiCS, which is part of the root of the name of Simics), and some universities started using Simics even before version 1.0 was out! When I joined the company in 2002 (it was Virtutech at the time), Simics had a strong presence in the academic sector. Today, Simics licenses are available for free to qualified academia through the Wind River University program (http://www.windriver.com/universities/). The value of a virtual platform is not been lost on the smart people working in universities across the globe, and we see a constant pull of Simics into many different application areas.

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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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When it comes to multi-core, it takes a village

By Jessica Schieve

Telecom and Network equipment providers are facing huge challenges to build and deploy products that can meet the growing performance and capacity demands while also delivering the service levels customers have come to expect.  In the rapidly evolving wireless and wireline broadband markets, multi-core technologies have become a tremendous force that is impacting the entire value chain of industry suppliers (the village) and how it is responds to meet these challenges.

Wind River and LSI’s village just got bigger, stronger, and smarter.  Today, Wind River and LSI announced a long-term strategic collaboration to optimize and tightly integrate their multi-core hardware and software portfolios.  LSI’s Axxia Communication Processors will be integrated with Wind River’s industry leading Linux and VxWorks platforms and development tools. Now, equipment providers can leverage this collaboration effort as a powerful advantage to build faster, more intelligent, and highly competitive network products.

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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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When is Scripting really Programming?

By Jakob Engblom

I recently updated some analysis scripts in Simics to use the new OS awareness framework in Simics 4.4. While doing so, I completely updated the structure of the code, ending up with something looking suspiciously like a regular Python program. It had declarations, classes, variables, did not rely on global variables, and was fairly robust to changes in the target. This got me thinking about the difference between "scripting" and "programming". When I was a computer science undergraduate in the 1990s, I recall the difference was very simple. Programming was done in C or other real languages (with the corresponding heated debate on whether anything except C or assembly counted), scripting was done in bash. For some reason, it does not feel that simple today.

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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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It is all about the interfaces!

By Michel Genard

I was at the Freescale conference this week (FTF2010 in Orlando, FL) and the Wednesday’ key note speech from Hugh Herr was truly inspiring in a lot of dimensions. First, at human being level, Hugh after suffering severe amputations of his legs (a climbing accident), instead of resigning to his condition to be forever disabled, he decided to study the field of biomechatronics, becomes an associate professor at MIT and designed prosthesis to turn his handicap as an advantage and he is climbing again! Secondly from an education perspective, he is clearly a very good teacher and knows well how to convey complex problems and challenges in easy to understand concept. 

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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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Travelling into 64-bit Land with Simics

By Jakob Engblom

The new Freescale QorIQ P5020 SoC that was announced this week at the Freescale Technology Forum means that yet another chip family has now moved to 64 bits from 32 bits. This is a familiar scenario that has been played out many times before, starting in the mid-1990s as Sun, IBM and MIPS upgraded their server processor architectures to 64 bits. Before that, we had Intel extending the x86 family from 16 bits to 32 bits and IBM extending the System/360 architecture from 24 bits to 31 bits. Each time, the changed caused software pain for a while as the software is updated to work in the new world with more bits to use.  It is also something that Simics has helped with in the past.

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