Wind River Acquires Real-Time Linux from FSMLabs

Published: February 27, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Real-time operating system supplier Wind River Systems last week acquired the assets of one of its rivals in this sub-market of the operating system space. Specifically, Wind River bought the intellectual property and code behind FSMLabs's RTLinux.

Wind River supplies its own real-time operating system, called VxWorks, which is a Unix-alike platform that is aimed at defense systems, process controllers, and other embedded systems that need the continuous processing capabilities of a real-time (as opposed to a general purpose) operating system. Wind River's Commercial Grade Linux 1.3, announced last August, is a special version of the Linux 2.6.16 kernel that has been tweaked with a pre-emptive, real-time patch that gives Linux some of the fine-grained processing that VxWorks has. The finer grain in the kernel processes means that latencies on interrupt processes are smaller, which makes Linux run smoother when it is dealing with lots of different processes--like a jet fighter subsystem or an embedded controller in a power plant is typically doing.

Wind River did not take easily to Linux. Back in February 2004, Wind River partnered with Red Hat in an effort to create a real-time variant of that company's Linux distribution, but the partnership and the effort failed. So Wind River created its own Linux variant and still maintains it to this day.

Finite State Machine Labs also created its own real-time operating systems, with RTCoreBSD and RTLinuxPro being POSIX-compliant, custom real-time operating systems that hook into BSD or Linux as their application servers. The RT kernel and BSD or Linux extensions from FSMLabs allow it run on embedded ARM or PowerPC processors as well as on X86 and X64 processors for servers and embedded devices. The real-time extensions that FSMLabs has created apparently allow Linux to ensure absolute response time within parameters set by the developers, which is better than what Wind River can guarantee with its own Linux implementation. This makes Linux as good as VxWorks in this regard. And because the RTLinuxPro solution is based on a two step approach--with the RTCore at the center and protected by copyright and patent and hooking into a Linux operating system stack above it--it is not affected by the open source provisions of the GNU General Public License. In other words, Wind River does not have to share the goodies.

Back in October, Novell and real-time operating system expert Concurrent Computer started shipping a real-time variant of the SUSE distribution, called SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10. This distribution is governed by the GPL, and apparently does not have the low latency of the approach created by FSMLabs.

RELATED STORIES

Novell Ships SLERT Variant of SUSE Linux

Novell, Concurrent Create Real-Time SUSE Linux Variant

Wind River Updates Linux, Donates Code to Eclipse

Red Hat, Wind River Systems Partner on Real-Time Linux

FSMLabs Tweaks BSD, Linux for Real-Time Use

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot