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Wind River Completes Embedded Linux Metamorphosis
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."
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
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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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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...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.
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.
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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.
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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...
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.
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/,
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
Besides, this story is about WindRiver adding Linux to its lineup, not replacing VxWorks.