Wind River Blog Network

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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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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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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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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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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Workbench and Jazz

By Emeka Nwafor

Today I managed to carve out some quality hands-on time to play with Wind River Workbench integrated with Rational Team Concert - also known as Jazz. While playing with this development environment, I found myself wishing that "I had these types of development tools back when I was doing embedded development environment".

If you are not familiar with Rational Team Concert (RTC), think of it as a collaborative development platform that unifies planning, tracking, automation of software development processes, team collaboration, work item management, and reporting (think dashboards) with traceability across all artifacts that participate in software delivery processes. By artifacts, I mean things like source code, builds, defects, requirements, log files, change sets, etc... In short, RTC is all about connecting team members.

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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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What is Simics, Really?

By Jakob Engblom

As you might have seen, Wind River recently acquired Simics, a product formerly sold by Virtutech. My colleagues Michel Genard and Bill Graham recently blogged on the topic.

Simics can have a huge impact on the product development processes, time-to-market and quality. Apart from the cool things that Simics does to improve the development process, it is also a very interesting technology in and by itself.

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So, What Does _Your_ Software Architecture Look Like?

By Mark Hermeling

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

This leads to interesting discussions, most customers can draw their hardware architectures, some can white board their software architectures easily, some have more problems, but I have a strong feeling that their drawing differs significantly from the actual implementation.

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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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Updates to Our VxWorks 653 Platform

By Bill Graham

In my previous post, I mentioned the update to our VxWork 653 platform but didn't go into too many details. I'll share a few more things in this post. Our VxWorks 653 Platform has been doing really well and we're quite proud of its success. In particular, our recent announcements about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and NASA Ares X-1 programs really put a spotlight on the product. As I mentioned in my last post, it's doing well because it enables aerospace and defense companies the chance to integrate a lot of systems onto one processor.

ARINC 653 is a time partitioning scheduling specification that allows designers to create safety critical systems that share the same processor yet guarantees time and space separation for each partition. My colleague Paul Parkinson goes into some detail in this post.

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Kill Bugs: Volume 1

By Emeka Nwafor

The Bride: [Japanese] I need Japanese steel. 

Hattori Hanzo: [Japanese] Why do you need Japanese steel? 

The Bride: [Japanese] I have vermin to kill. 

Hattori Hanzo: [English] You must have big rats if you need Hattori Hanzo's steel. 

The Bride: [English] ... Huge. 

(from Kill Bill: Vol. 1)

I will probably need the help of a therapist to assist me in decoding why I think of that passage from Tarantino's great movie whenever I think of our portfolio of multicore development tools.

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The Multicore Transition: Tools are Key to Success

By Bill Graham

We just announced a new release of our state of the art tools which includes an update to Workbench and Workbench OCD version 3.2, plus our Wind River Compiler suite (also known as the Diab compiler). This news reminded me of my days as a product manager for tools software and the need to talk about the importance of tools to project success.

For embedded software companies where so much emphasis is given to supported hardware, operating systems and middleware technologies, tools can get ignored in the fray.

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What Exactly are You Testing, and How?

By Emeka Nwafor

"What exactly are you testing? How are you testing it?"

I'm sure that these are amongst the questions that product, business, and technical managers across the embedded software industry have asked themselves on several occasions throughout their careers. I know I have.

The importance of testing embedded software isn't new. In my "youth", I remember our VP of Product Development circulating a white paper that discussed the devastating impact resulting from the deployment of an untested "simple" patch to some switching software and declaring that "this cannot happen to us".

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Addressing Core Issues

By Mark Hermeling

A good article from colleague Jens Wiegand on multicore in medical devices. Jens talks about consolidation and innovation, two driving factors in both medical and industrial devices. However, he also points out the flip side of the coin: certification. Virtualization can help provide strong separation on multicore, which makes certification manageable (the article goes into more depth).

Jens also touches on tooling for multicore development, an often-overlooked and under appreciated aspect. A single development environment that can be used to develop the entire device (real-time, UI, kernels, userland) as well as drive testing and debugging is a must to create highly efficient development teams.

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Simulation? Virtualization? What's in a name?

By Emeka Nwafor

Check out this great panel round-table conversation about Virtualization & Simulation featuring a great set of panelists from Virtutech, Freescale, Cadence, GreenSocs, and our own Wind River CTO. The discussion touches on a number of important topics, including:

• the differences between virtualization and simulation
• the level of abstractions in models and their importance in predicting a system's behavior
• methodologies driving vendors solutions for virtualization and simulation
• programmable hardware and vanilla (i.e. standard) platforms

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Ada & C mixed language development

By Paul Parkinson

Last week, I downloaded AdaCore's GNAT Pro 6.2.2 and the latest GNATbench 2.3.1 release (which was announced yesterday), as I wanted to port an Ada & C mixed-language application to VxWorks 6.7.

I wanted to do this to show a customer how they can develop new Ada applications (as well reusing existing intellectual property) and integrate them with network protocol stacks, graphics libraries and other middleware which are often implemented in C or C++.

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2009 Autumnal Equinox

By Emeka Nwafor

September 21st marks the last full day of the memorable summer of 2009, a summer that was memorable on several fronts - including personal and professional. My summer of 2009 includes memories of rainfalls of near biblical proportions, personal triumphs and losses, the passing of several social icons, and the evolution of the embedded software market.

There is some small debate as to when summer officially ends and when we must stop wearing white to work. If the sun could talk, I would guess that it would suggest that summer officially ends and fall begins at the moment of the autumnal equinox. This is the moment in the September when the sun is vertical to the equator. This year's autumnal equinox will occur on September 22nd at 17:18 ET (21:18 UTC) - just about five hours and eight minutes after the opening keynote at the 2009 Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco, California. This is also about nineteen and half hours before the day 2 keynote titled "Developing for the Continuum of Intel Platforms".

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printf("Hello World!!! \n");

By Emeka Nwafor

I have been putting off launching my corporate blog for what seems like months. So today, it is with great excitement I say "hello" to the extended Wind River community! The issue of trying to chose what to write about in my first post has been a bigger challenge than I expected. I chose the "printf" title for two reasons:

• it seemed like a cute and natural way to test if my blog account was set-up correctly;
• the continued popularity of printf statements for debugging embedded systems, and the motivations behing this popularity, is a topic worth touching on.

Using printf statements to debug software has been around forever and will probably never disappear completely. A quick google survey uncovered the colourful quote from ariels that says "I'll give up printf() when you pry my cold dead fingers from it". Ariels posting also highlights some of the challenges leading embedded software developers to resort to using printf for debugging.

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The Software Managers’ Blind Spot....

By Paul Henderson

I’m amazed at the consistency of input I’m getting from device software execs around the world about their lack of visibility into their testing process. Everybody is spending huge amounts of time and money (30-50% of their projects) on testing, but I haven’t found anyone yet that is comfortable with the result. I hear statements like this consistently:

“We have thousands of test cases and we’re afraid to not run them. In fact we are adding more all the time. But we really don’t know what software we are actually testing.”

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Creating the Next Generation of Technology Leaders

By Warren Kurisu

FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) just kicked off the 2009 FIRST Robotics Championship in Atlanta Georgia.  If you aren’t aware of what the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) is, check out this cool video.  I first became aware of FRC when I was visiting a key customer and partner, National Instruments, who asked me if Wind River would be interested in partnering with them to sponsor the 2009 FRC.  Since this would consume time and energy and there was no direct business attached to the event, I was initially dubious.  But once I understood the positive impact of a “yes” decision, the decision was easy.

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FIRST Robotics

By Doug Gaff

A colleague of mine pointed me to this very positive review of Wind River Workbench, our Eclipse-based environment for device software development. This customer was thrilled to use a product that "just works" after it's installed. He's also a big fan of Eclipse. The most humorous part of the review:

The good people at Wind River allow you to download a trial version of Workbench, after you fill out a form about a mile long and agree to give them your first born child.

(Actually Roger, we don't require that you give us your first born. However, we do ask that you rename your child. You may pick from our convenient list of executive names.)

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I love OCD

By Doug Gaff

No, I’m not talking about locking the front door exactly 3 times before going to bed or using a new bar of soap each time I wash my hands à la Jack Nicholson. I’m talking about On-Chip Debugging – using JTAG tools for device software debugging.

I got my start at Wind River working on JTAG-based debuggers. A couple of years ago, my team integrated Wind River’s JTAG emulators into our Eclipse-based product, Wind River Workbench. It was quite a challenge connecting hardware debugging to a debugging framework focused on application development, and the Device Debugging and Target Management projects spun out of that effort.

Today I manage our Eclipse open source contributions, but I still sit next to my OCD buddies. When they’re not nervously clicking their retractable pens, they’re writing firmware for our JTAG emulators. Today, they released a cool new emulator that blows away their previous products:

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Rhapsody && Coverage Analysis

By Paul Parkinson

I've recently been working with a customer to integrate Wind River Coverage Analysis (formerly known as CoverageScope) with Telelogic Rhapsody within their development tools framework for a mission-critical system.

At first glance, it might seem strange to integrate a code coverage testing tool with a UML design tool, as these aren't even adjacent phases in the software development life cycle (implementation being between them). However, the advent of Eclipse in recent years has helped to break down the silos which used to confine tools individual development life cycle stages and improved development work flow.

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Commercial Releases, Blog Aggregators, and EclipseCon

By Doug Gaff

I’ve been very busy the past couple of months planning the upcoming release of our Eclipse-based device software development product, Wind River Workbench. This is an exciting release for my team and I, because we’re picking up three additional Eclipse projects in Wind River Workbench from the Europa train: TM, DD, and CDT. Those of you closely following the CDT and DSDP projects have seen my team contributing to these projects for the past year in preparation for this commercial adoption. This has been an extensive effort on both the open source and commercial sides, and we’re excited to see everything coming together.

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Eclipse - Babel fish for engineers?

By Paul Parkinson

In the recent blog More Eclipse News, Alex Wilson commented on how Eclipse is becoming increasingly pervasive throughout the software development life cycle.

Alex mentioned that the seamless integration of these tools through Eclipse makes life easier for developers (which I interpreted as: single user interface (UI), consistent look & feel, improved productivity, etc., etc.), but I believe that there's also another important benefit which is perhaps less obvious.

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Tools standardisation

By Alex Wilson

Changing tracks for a moment I couldn't help but pick up on one of my Google Alerts this morning regarding what is essentially the technology behind DSO standardisation - ECLIPSE.

Here is what I read

Pluginfest Day Two By Adrian Taylor

Some of the tools available from WindRiver, for example, are just light years ahead of what’s available for Symbian OS. ... The QNX and WindRiver tools are terrific. WindRiver’s memory profiling stuff in particular blew me away. ...

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RDC in China

By Tomas Evensen

I just came back from a couple of weeks in China. Fascinating country. Besides the usual customer visits, we also held three Regional Development Conferences (RDCs) in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing.

The RDCs were a huge success with on average more than 400 attendees per day. And they were all very interested in hearing about Wind River's latest offerings and future plans.

How do I know they all were interested? Well, my leading indicator was that all seats were taken from the front working towards the back. Somewhat different from your typical American or European conference, where the back seats seem to be the hottest commodity. (BTW, I am of course not indicating that our American and European friends are not interested... Perhaps they have better eye sight).

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Remote System Explorer 1.0 is released

By Martin Oberhuber

The Target Management Project is pleased to announce its first public release: The Remote System Explorer (RSE) 1.0 is now available for download as well as the project update site.

RSE is a framework and toolkit in Eclipse Workbench, that allows you to connect and work with a variety of remote systems, including

• remote file systems through SSH, FTP or dstore agents (seamless editing of  remote files including remote search and compare),
• remote shell access (compiling with error navigation),
• remote process handling through dstore agents,
• and remote debugging through CDT / gdb.

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New Manager Hired for Embedded Linux Development Tools

Wind River recently hired Sven Dummer to manage its line of Eclipse-based Wind River Workbench tools for embedded Linux developers. According to Linuxdevices.com, Sven believes strongly in the open source model: "Eclipse, Linux, and GNU is a kind of dream team for me, and Workbench combines all this, with a focus more on the commercial side."

Read more about Sven at Linuxdevices.com ››