At the recent Take Down Conference, a scheduled talk on security vulnerabilities in SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) systems was cancelled due to direct requests from the Department of Homeland Security and Siemens. The request was made because the details of the vulnerabilities and the exploits associated with these vulnerabilities were too sensitive at this point in time. Continue reading

The recent news about the demise of the Mars Rover Spirit and comments about how it succeeded its mission many times over, got me thinking about just how long product lifetimes are for embedded products. In many industries using embedded software to control devices, the expected lifespan is decades which contrasts sharply to consumer devices where either software is upgraded constantly or we dispose of the device in a few years. Continue reading

We just announced our latest major release of VxWorks 6.9 as the foundation for innovation in embedded software. What do we mean by this? There are two main aspects to this concept. Firstly, developers don't usually get enough time to innovate and work on differentiating features in a product (or cool whiz bang capabilities that make the product stand out). Continue reading

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. Our VxWorks MILS product provides highly secure partitioning of a system into high, medium and low assurance virtual systems (or boards) that can be high, medium, or low assurance, as needed by the customer's... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

Wind River regularly contributes to education programs across the globe. One of these institutions is University of São Paulo 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 program. In this post and the next, is an interview with Professor Glauco Caurin who teaches in robotics, mechatronics and mechanical engineering USP's São Carlos Engineering School: Continue reading

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... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

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. Continue reading

Wind River's CTO, Tomas Evensen gave a keynote today at the Multicore Expo in San Jose, California today 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 case multicore in a real customer use case, we see the benefit and value much more. Continue reading

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. Then... Continue reading

Our customer, Huawei, recently announced they have been chosen to deploy Australia's first LTE network. This is great news because Huawei's LTE base stations are built using VxWorks - the VxWorks Platform for Networking Equipment to be exact. It's also great news because we are starting to see the fruits of our customers' efforts come to reality and it stands as a validation of our investment in next generation networks. Moreover, this is the latest in a set of successes we've had with VxWorks in the networking space. In particular the technology investments we've made such as mobile IP, multicore... Continue reading

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. Continue reading

Today at the Avionics Europe conference in Amsterdam, Wind River has announced some interesting news that highlights our success in avionics with the VxWorks product line. We announced a major update to our VxWorks 653 platform which I'll go into more detail in an upcoming post but the highlights include support for Intel Architecture and Power Architecture e600 support, new power-safe file systems support and additional protocols in the networking stack. Continue reading

I was very excited on hearing about Intel's acquisition of Virtutech and subsequent announcement that Simics was going to be part of our product line. Why? Because Simics gives you access to hardware platforms before they're even made (including multicore platforms.) In my experience, access to hardware platforms and having enough for everyone is a constant concern during development. Many developers are targeting their new product for new hardware platforms that are still in development and hoping for the stars to align so their software and the hardware platform delivery dates align. Now, if you are on this bleeding edge... Continue reading

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. This is unfortunate because tools are key to project success because they can make the difference between meeting a deadline or missing it for weeks. Tools are all about developer productivity and getting problems solved faster. Continue reading

"Diverse" is certainly as word that applies to embedded systems. In fact, it's difficult to really de fine embedded systems because they can be a windshield wiper controller, a home theater remote control or an Internet backbone switch that handles gigabytes of data per second. VxWorks has been used in all of these types of systems and can do this because it offers flexible solutions for our customers. As systems become larger and more complex customers are usually seeking more options such as middleware for networking or graphics. As systems get smaller, however, customers are usually seeking less options and... Continue reading

An important distinction that gets drilled into people new to safety critical systems and certification of said systems is the difference between "certified" and "certification evidence." When certifying a safety critical system to a very strict standard such as DO-178B, the system as a whole is certified not individual components such as operating systems or middleware. Verification and validation of safety critical systems is very expensive and time consuming. Continue reading