Interview with Jay Michaelson of Wasabi Systems

Gentu writes "The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. OSNews talked to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson. Linux in the embedded market is also discussed."

Comments

Wasabi Systems?

[TheSHAD0W]

Was this company formed before or after the Budweiser "True" commercials?

Re:Wasabi Systems?

[PD]

It was named after the Japanese spicy green pasty sushi yummy stuff, which was in turn named after the Budweiser commercials.

funny

[lingqi]

7. What new CPUs are you working on adding NetBSD support?
Jay Michaelson: ... We also ported NetBSD to the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, and the SuperH SH-5 last fall ...

Virtex-II pro is an FPGA so you can't really "port to it" - though the catch is that they comes with IBM's powerPC cores embedded. Why would he mention that he ported to Virtex-II pro instead of just PowerPC architecture?

and btw, it's kind of silly to name your company after horse-radish, especially done AFTER the budwiser commercials came out (the company was founded in 2000). Well, at least it's not named after certain rich person's (lack of) manhood, so I stay thankful for that...

Re:funny

[gr]

Why would he mention that he ported to Virtex-II pro instead of just PowerPC architecture?

Presumably because significant effort was necessary over and above the existing NetBSD/powerpc port to get the OS to actually run on that hardware with full features. Kind of like how there's a separate NetBSD/macppc port.

Wasabi Systems

[BJH]

Since the first three posts (not by me, I hasten to add) were all modded down to -1 in less than a minute, I'll try to post something more worthwhile.

Wasabi Systems offers three main components:

Maguro
This is their embedded kernel, using a customized NetBSD kernel with extensions designed to allow better low-power operation and lower latency for real-time applications.

Uni
This is a custom, proprietary API supplied by Wasabi Systems that provides a variety of functionality for embedded systems, including interfacing with FieldNet devices such as the Kohada2010F and Tako ABV modules.

Ika
This is another proprietary API layer from Wasabi, which allows the use of WinCE applications on their systems without recompiling, thanks to a branch of the WINE project (called SAKE) that adds compatible system calls for over 95% of WinCE library routines.

It's a wonderful company run by a bunch of great guys - I wish them all the best.

Interview is (-1 Flaim bait)

[satanami69]

Uh oh. Jay Michaelson goes on to quote the GPL "that the GPL requires hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of IP to be shared, and they don't like it. It's a real concern in embedded." I can hear zealots complaining that software needs to be free, etc.

Honestly though, the BSD license does offer a great reward to users. Companies can offer back to the community and are given a choice. GPL take s the choice away from vendors. Although who knows what gets put into the code unless it's released to all.

Scalability

[rf0]

In the interview they said that NetBSD can scale but does anyone have a comparision between says the locks in the linux kernel and the NetBSD kernel? I'm just intrested in how high they can both scale. I know that Linux is now running upto 64 CPU's in the shape of the SGI Altix but I have no idea how far NetBSD goes

Rus

Re:Scalability

[Anonymous Coward]

You're thinking of scaling the wrong way. They can scale the system down to have a smaller foot print (thus the whole embedded approach of the business). Last I heard, NetBSD didn't do SMP though that may have changed since the last time I played with it (a quick search on the netbsd site indicates that smp was only recently merged into -current so expecting it to scale with linux is likely out of the question...try FreeBSD for that).

Re:Scalability

[Arandir]

How many embedded systems do you know that require symmetrical multiprocessing? Seriously now. I'm certain there's a few, but if there are any that require 64 CPU's I would be extremely surprised. I would be mildly surprised if there were more than a dozen that needed 8.

Re:Scalability

[cyb97]

There are several embedded systems that use SMP, namely a lot of mobilephones do so... One for software and one for GSM-handling, that's the kludge phonemakers used to get around the timing problems with GSM. Dual CPU-phones don't put as high demands upon RealTime handling and stability on the softwareside of things as the GSM-CPU would still be available to handle GSM-requests...

Re:Scalability

[Anonymous Coward]

Routers, printers

The IP stack of NetBSD is really really good. Plus the NetBSD source code is a beauty. Welldocumented all they way. In Linux, particulary drivers, the code contains undocumented statements like

p[20] = 0x80;

In NetBSD it would have a define, or at least a comment....

But I'm biased after 3 years of various Network-startups with NetBSD as a base. Also, my most of my knowledge comes from 2.0.something Linux-kernel.. But from what I've seen. The style-guide of Linux-drivers hasn't changed that much... ;-) /over and out

Re:Scalability

[LizardKing]

Last I heard, NetBSD didn't do SMP though that may have changed since the last time I played with it

The SMP support is shaping up nicely. I have it running on a dual processor SparcStation 20 which recent versions of the Linux kernel wont even compile on, let alone boot. Both my i386 machines are uniprocessor (laptops), so I can't comment on the performance on commodity hardware.

Chris

The best about thing about Wasabi...

[leoboiko]

Don't forget the samurai daemon!

Who needs a fat penguin or a yellow fish? This is the best mascot ever :)

Re:Well?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong! I think FreeBSD has had SMP support even longer than Linux, alas it was for DEC Alpha only way back in the begining of the project.
Most Linux user make fun of GIANT, but in reality it's not much of an issue, as the system shouldn't spend time in the kernel (as it does in Linux) but actually run userland stuff, so, GIANT isn't that much of an issue on 8 or less CPU's.

Re:Well?

[LizardKing]

Does NetBSD support multiple processors?

Yes, for several years now. Initially it relied on one big kernel lock, just like pre 2.4 Linux did, but it's moving to finer grained locking. The great thing is NetBSD's dedication to portability, and it runs on MP i386, SPARC, Alpha, and Vax(!) systems that I'm aware of.

For the lowdown, see: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-smp/

Chris

Re:Well?

[LizardKing]

You have some proof of "moving to finer grained locking"

I assume that was a question or accusation rather than a simple statement. Well, the proof is on the tech-smp mailing list where Paul Kranenburg and Frank van der Linden have both posted recent commments on locking improvements. Some subsystems are still not guaranteed to be OK with these finer grained locks, but the fact that testing is being carried out by switching the BKL off entirely is encouraging.

As for open source developers doing things at the their own pace and priority, I get the impression that Frank van der Linden is working to some sort of Wasabi schedule. Not that it means we'll see enterprise class SMP in a stable NetBSD release anytime soon, but it suggests someone is being paid to expend a fair proportion of their time on it.

Chris

Also on-topic...

[BrokenHalo]

The best way I've found to make a Japanese waiter crack up is to loudly ask for a mawashi to go with your sashimi. It's a sumo wrestler's jock-strap. Not quite the same thing as wasabi, but it might make your eyes water all the same :-)

Re:One long advert.

[gr]

Jay's the legal and publications guy, cut him some slack. He certainly gave straight answers to the questions he was asked.

What technical questions where you hoping to hear answered?

Perhaps Slashdot should do its own interview with a Wasabi engineer? (Perry Metzger, Christos Zoulas, Allen Briggs, Jason Thorpe...)

Re:One long advert.

[gr]

reading it I got the feeling you do when somewhere just republishes a press release.

Well, being as Jay's responsible for writing at least some of Wasabi's press releases, that makes sense. :^>

As for the /. interview... it'd be sort of be mindless evangelism on my part. I use NetBSD on all of my own computers, interned with Wasabi for a summer during college, know those people I mentioned (some even personally), and take active part in the NetBSD mailing lists. I certainly don't have questions that I can't get answered on my own time.