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Wind River Completes Embedded Linux Metamorphosis

Posted by Hemos on from the going-to-the-tiny dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Embedded software powerhouse Wind River's metamorphosis into an embedded Linux vendor appears to be complete. The company will announce today that it is shipping a pre-release version of its first embedded Linux distribution, and that it has already delivered 1,000 "developer seats" for the Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 compliant software."

28 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. VxWorks by lxdbxr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I wouldn't say their "metamorphosis", if they ever purported to want or aim to do such a thing, is complete - I mean they are still selling VxWorks right? I believe the top four platforms on their Product Directory are based on VxWorks, not Linux. I think they can fairly be described as an embedded software vendor that supplies Linux platforms, rather than an "embedded Linux vendor".

    --
    -- Nothing unusual happened today
    1. Re:VxWorks by saider · · Score: 3, Insightful

      They still run VxWorks and then run something else on top. In this case, Linux. But VxWorks is still handling the hardware, etc. This is also how RTLinux works as well.

      --


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    2. Re:VxWorks by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I think they can fairly be described as an embedded software vendor that supplies Linux platforms, rather than an "embedded Linux vendor".

      Right on.

      They haven't switched. (At least they haven't if the management is on the ball.) They've just added a new product line. Maybe it will pick up. Meanwhile the old standby is still there. Take your pick. Whichever way the market goes they're in the game.

      Now they're a two-trick pony.

      --
      Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  2. Smart Move by blueZhift · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think Wind River is making a smart move. They could have easily dug their heels in and raged against the Linux tide. Instead they're going with the flow and building to take advantage of new opportunities and serving their customers' needs. Good show!

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    1. Re:Smart Move by bhima · · Score: 2, Informative

      They DID dig their heels in and raged against the Linux tide. I remember some of their public statements being fairly barbed too! I have to admit I had just switched from VxWorks to NetBSD so maybe I was paying attention a little more closely

      --
      Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
    2. Re:Smart Move by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      That was the old regime. I worked at Wind River in 2002, when they were in dire straits, and met the then-CEO, Tom St. Denis, who was firmly anti-Linux--to the point that, if someone in a meeting mentioned Linux, he would just ignore you, as if you hadn't spoken. (Wasn't just me--other people told me the same thing happened to them.) A while after that, St Denis got fired (okay, "left the company to pursue other opportunities") and the new CEO (Ken Klein) is very pro-Linux. I was at a meeting in December where he spoke enthusiastically about open source, and reminded us that the company wants to maintain a "good neighbor policy" (i.e., let developers devote company time to open source projects.) I think this attitude is the single biggest difference between the struggling Wind River of 2002 and the stable Wind River of 2005.

    3. Re:Smart Move by bani · · Score: 2, Informative

      They could have easily dug their heels in and raged against the Linux tide.

      this is in fact what they did do. they used to be one of the most vocal anti-linux vendors around, next to microsoft.

  3. Considering they did the Mars Rover by kbahey · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Considering that it is the same company that did the Mars Rover software, this is a big thing.

    For a company with such a high profile product to adopt Linux is only a good thing.

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    1. Re:Considering they did the Mars Rover by dmh20002 · · Score: 4, Informative

      Wind River DID NOT do the Mars Rover software. JPL did. JPL only used Vxworks as the OS. Any mature real time OS would have worked. JPL did the hard part.

  4. WIND stock price rebound ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Market thinks they are turning it around.

    Less geeky Stock Talk chat here.

    1. Re:WIND stock price rebound ... by Y2 · · Score: 2, Interesting
      The Market thinks they are turning it around.

      With a trailing P/E of 276, the market must think WindRiver has a philosopher's stone up its sleeve! Even darling GOOG is only half that pricey.

      --
      "But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
  5. Interesting move... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...but is Linux really the platform for hard real-time embedded control? I like Linux as much as the next /.er, but it's not the ultimate solution for everything. VxWorks does something very different to most Linux boxes. Let's keep some variety in the world, so we can choose the tool for the job.

    1. Re:Interesting move... by Erwos · · Score: 4, Informative

      No, it's not. I used to think Linux would be all that and a bag of chips for embedded systems, but working with it dissuaded me of that fantasy.

      It doesn't have a nanosecond clock, and there aren't any patches available for the 2.6 kernel.

      There's no real-time support without patching the living hell out of your kernel, and then possibly running a mini-kernel underneath.

      And, while not strictly relevant, it also doesn't have PPS API support built-in, which means you're also in for a wonderful round of patching to get something even remotely workable for synchronized systems. There's still no hardpps() support, so even that's just a maybe.

      If you want something suitable for critical, real-time embedded systems, you'd have to patch the kernel so much that it'd barely look like Linux at the end.

      -Erwos

      --
      Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
    2. Re:Interesting move... by sysadmn · · Score: 2, Insightful
      This is Slashdot, don't let the fact that you didn't read the article slow you down. The article, in fact, said
      Wind River has said that it expects PNE Linux Edition to popular with makers of telecommunications equipment who use Linux on the control plane along with VxWorks on the data plane, and that the platform would include middleware allowing Linux and VxWorks processes to communicate with each other.
      . So VxWorks does what it's good at - hard realtime, and Linux does what it's good at - general purpose computing.
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    3. Re:Interesting move... by iabervon · · Score: 2, Informative

      Standard Linux doesn't do hard real-time, but it is good for parts of the system which don't require hard real-time. If you write a hard real-time system suitably, also, you can use large and valuable portions of Linux with it. The point is really that you can get a programmer familiar with Linux to do all the relatively easy parts of the embedded system, instead of taking up your real-time specialist's time or needing to train someone on special-purpose APIs.

      There's also a substantial market for non-real-time embedded systems. Just last week, a SuSE engineer released support for a number of different touchscreens, useful for stores and restaurants. Obviously, you don't need real-time on a cash register, but you have very limited resources and unusual peripherals (e.g., a computer with two touchscreens, a magnetic card reader, a barcode scanner, a lock, a cash drawer, and a line printer; no keyboard or mouse). And you want a pretty simple program, and you want it to be easy to write, easy to customize, and easy to test.

  6. Re:Nasa wont switch to Linux by Ungrounded+Lightning · · Score: 3, Insightful

    NASA uses VXWorks, it is one of thir best customers. They are very conservative, wont switch to linux.

    When you've spent billions hardening a technology to extremes of reliability, a single failure costs you hundreds of millions and maybe several lives, and the technology you've hardened is more than adequate for the next job, you'd be a fool to switch.

    You switch when the job can't be done without a switch, or when the benefits (including risk reductions) outweigh the costs and risks.

    It's when you're starting from scratch that older and newer technologies are on a nearly level playing field. When an old tech is in place and performing well the new one needs to have a BIG advantage to displace it.

    --
    Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
  7. Re:4 words by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    actually a little more than that needs to be said.

    if they have a solid RT linux product for their embedded offerings then they might be able to tie things up and run with it. If it's a general purpose embedded linux then they just wasted a HUGE amount of time.

    A slightly good linux person with 5 days of time and a copy of building embedded linux systems can throw down a good fast small embedded linux distro that will make ANYTHING that a commercial distro look silly and horribly overpriced.

    We looked at embedded linux distros 4 years ago here and settled on a roll your own.

    we have a better product that we KNOW works for us, is easily customized and is certianly much smaller than anything we could buy.

    --
    Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  8. Yes. Other real time linux distro's by zymano · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://www.fsmlabs.com/
    http://www.lynuxworks.com /

    http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Operating_Sys te ms/Realtime/Linux/

  9. Re:4 words by ajrs · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yours for only 5 days of developer time! < fast talk > maintenance and support not included. some restrictions may apply. some assembly required.

  10. Subtle ad? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    An anonymous reader writes "Embedded software powerhouse Wind River..."

    $20 says the "anonymous reader" is a Wind River employee or shareholder.

    Of course, I'm sure that someone will suggest that this anonymous posting is from a Wind River competitor...

  11. Wind River's Linux strategy by richard_willey · · Score: 3, Informative

    Couple points here that I think need to be made:

    1. Historically, Wind River's success in the embedded market was based on the strength of its tool chain rather than the strength of its embedded OS. I suspect that the company's decision to broad the number of OS's that it is supporting is a reflection that the management team has figured this out.

    2. As networking becoming more and more important, the requirement for a hard real-time operating systems decreases. You can't get deterministic performance out of a TCP/IP, which means that you can't get it out of a networked application. As a result, a number of designs are going in a different direction, combining a hard real-time hardware component coupled with an embedded Linux control/management plane...

  12. Even WinCE is better... by mosel-saar-ruwer · · Score: 2, Informative

    People rag on M$FT architectures to no end, but WinCE does surprisingly well in real world tests, and Linux does surprisingly poorly:
    RunTime: Context switching, Part 1
    High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows

    RunTime: Context switching, Part 2
    High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows

    COMPARISON BETWEEN QNX RTOS V6.1, VXWORKS AE 1.1 AND WINDOWS CE .NET
    PDF DOCUMENT

    1. Re:Even WinCE is better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      It should be pointed out that Wind River doesn't even sell Vxworks AE any more, and hasn't for about 2-3 years.. it was a branch that 'died on the vine' so to speak. AE added lots of features that probably slowed it down a lot. I suspect the results would be quite different if VxWorks 5.5 were used in the comparisons...

  13. Re:Nasa wont switch to Linux by bani · · Score: 3, Informative

    NASA uses Linux for a lot of things, just not space probes (yet). You can see Linux quite heavily used on the desktop machines in mission control at JPL for various space probes.

    Linux does fly on space shuttle missions though, various experiments have been run by linux embedded systems.

  14. Re:4 words by ajrs · · Score: 2, Funny

    your browser must not render the tag

  15. Re:4 words by den_erpel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Same here.

    I joined a team working on functionality running on an embedded Linux distribution about a year ago. After doing major cleanup in the sources, including an upgrade to the newest release of the embedded distribution; I started looking under the hood.

    Several portions of the distributions were replaced by busybox, uclibc and a gcc-3.4 based toolchain. In the process, we built our own Perl based build system (with CVS): we check in/out only the modified files (basically only platform files) and use the original tarballs (tar xkfj).

    As a result, we were able to decrease the embedded compressed filesystem to less than 33%, our code is much closer to the upstream developments (e.g. for network drivers, this can be an issue) and our system is modular and flexible. (btw, size does matter in production and for field upgrades): smaller, faster and cleaner...

    I am currently in the process of cleaning up the platform dependent files for release and inclusion into the upstream projects (hopefully they get accepted).

    We moved away and have not looked back and saved over 25,000 Euros per year (and rising) in the process. Yes, the embedded distributions are terribly expensive. If you have money to spare, consider hiring teams from the companies selling expertise and releasing the code like http://www.denx.de/, http://www.codepoet.org/, http://www.pengutronix.de/, http://www.mind.be/, ...

    --
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  16. Re:Nasa wont switch to Linux by GileadGreene · · Score: 4, Informative
    Uh, yeah, you might want to take a look at NASA's FlightLinux project before you make statements like that.

    Besides, this story is about WindRiver adding Linux to its lineup, not replacing VxWorks.

  17. Re:Nasa wont switch to Linux by fabu10u$ · · Score: 2, Interesting
    a single failure costs you hundreds of millions and maybe several lives
    Case in point, last I heard they're not even on VxWorks on the shuttle. I think they're still on IBM 360's, at least for the major systems.
    --
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