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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."

9 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
  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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    To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
    1. 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. WIND stock price rebound ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    The Market thinks they are turning it around.

    Less geeky Stock Talk chat here.

  4. 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.
  5. 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.

  6. 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/, ...

    --
    Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
  7. 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.