Wind River Blog Network

Making Multicore CPUs Work in Embedded Communications Designs

2009-11-11T09:07:02-08:00

By Mark Hermeling

A good article by Jarrod Siket highlighting the need for a good heterogenous multicore design to be able to meet the need of embedded communications systems. I couldn't agree more. Jarrod has a number of good suggestions as to which engineering challenges need to be addressed. The article is quite timely as I just finished a webinar with Kontron on Multicore and virtualization focussing on ATCA.

Jarrod also makes the statement that 'no other processor architecture is more widely adopted or better suited than x86'. I'll certainly agree that x86 is widely adopted and that it has been doing virtualization longer than the other architectures out there due to it's IT roots.

Primary Multicore Software Configurations

2009-11-10T09:15:37-08:00

By Mark Hermeling

Many people ask the question as to what the best approach would be for them to go to multicore and/or virtualization. This is a great question to start a discussion as there is not a single silver bullet.

I meant to post a quick diagram on the different multicore configurations before, but life has been busy since we announced the Wind River Hypervisor earlier this year. Busy in this case is certainly a good thing.

What Exactly are You Testing, and How?

2009-11-04T09:34:27-08:00

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".

A&D Regional Conferences

2009-11-04T09:31:15-08:00

By Paul Parkinson

I've recently finished updating presentations on The Essentials of Multicore Software and Challenges of Security Software Development for our forthcoming Aerospace & Defence Conferences which we are holding across Europe in November.

It's been interesting to think about how multicore can be used in technology refreshes and applied to new programmes. I'm looking forward to discussing these issues with customers, as well as understanding their security requirements, particularly as the need for interoperability continues to grow.

Busting the Myths around VxWorks #6: Safety

2009-11-03T12:00:31-08:00

By Bill Graham

Software safety is related to many factors but I think the impression that an operating system is unreliable conjures up the perception it is unsafe as well. I’ve spent time in other posts dispelling myths surrounding VxWorks reliability. Rather than repeat myself I’ll point to my previous post on reliability – the points made there, apply here too. The proof point for the safety of VxWorks lies in the success of our customers.

VxWorks supports three of the most important and stringent safety standards in the world. Firstly for the commercial and military avionics market we have VxWorks ARINC 653 and VxWorks DO-178B.

G.hn, does it get the crown for in-home networking?

2009-10-29T10:29:28-07:00

By Nikhil Chauhan

The new buzzword in wired networking is G.hn, pronounced as "G dot hn".

I know, it does add another word to the alphabet soup of technologies, but I do think that it solves a fundamental lingering problem.

Our homes have various types of wiring available today; these constitute power, cable, phone, etc. The problem is that all of these satisfy their own purposes. The technologies today are fragmented; big time! There are MOCA (adopted in Verizon's fiber network) and HomePNA (AT&T's U-Verse network is based on this) that use coaxial wiring for CPE devices.

Busting the Myths Around VxWorks #5: Security

2009-10-28T13:39:57-07:00

By Bill Graham

In reality this isn’t a myth, it’s more of an awareness problem. Our solution for the need for high robustness systems is the VxWorks MILS product. VxWorks MILS is designed to provide Multiple independent Levels of Security (MLS), a security concept that ensures that complete separation is provided between secure and non-secure portions of a system (and that it is impossible to subvert this to gain access to the classified partition in the system from the non-secure).

We have designed the MILS product to conform to the separation kernel protection profile as defined by the Common Criteria (aka ISO 15408) and is currently undergoing official certification to Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+.

Addressing Core Issues

2009-10-28T10:57:27-07:00

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.

Quit Bugging Me: Memory Leak!

2009-10-26T12:20:48-07:00

By Mike Deliman

A perennial question arises... "Did I find a memory leak in the shell? See what it does?"

This question naturally arises after a customer has been debugging a while, and runs short on memory for some allocation. They check into it, and they find that when they call certain shell functions, they find memory missing after the call.

Here are typical examples of "memory leaks" from the shell...

Busting the Myths around VxWorks #4: VxWorks reliability

2009-10-26T12:15:44-07:00

By Bill Graham

I don’t think we are promoting the reliability of our products well enough. In particular, a key attribute and value of VxWorks is its reliability. Being a newcomer to Wind River my colleagues here were surprised to hear that the reliability of VxWorks would have been called into question. Being on the inside, of course, I am now aware of the various proof points regarding VxWorks’ reliability:

VxWorks has been built into over a billion devices. VxWorks has been in more devices than any other RTOS and been on the market for more than 20 years. Assuming linear growth and at least 25% of these devices are still on the market, VxWorks has over 2 Trillion (2x1012) hours in operation (that is 250 million years!)