Wind River Updates Linux, Donates Code to Eclipse

Published: August 1, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Wind River Systems, a provider of a real-time operating system called VxWorks with a long history in the subset of the computing market that focuses on real-time, embedded systems and the development tools necessary for them. Over the past few years, Wind River has been moving into the Linux space while supporting VxWorks. This week, the company is announcing its Commercial Grade Linux 1.3 platform, its fourth iteration of that platform, as well as contributing code to the Eclipse open source integrated tool environment project.

Commercial Grade Linux 1.3 is based on the Linux 2.6.16 kernel, and is not based on a modified Red Hat distribution, but rather a unique Linux environment created by and maintained by Wind River. You might recall that in February 2004, Red Hat and Wind River announced a partnership to collaborate on a real-time Linux implementation, but Glenn Seiler, senior manager of Linux platforms at the company, said that didn't work out. The reason is modifications to the Linux stack. The Red Hat distribution is geared toward generic servers, and the Red Hat support process does not allow modifications to the code or support is invalidated. "This is completely alien to the device market, where almost everyone makes modifications," explains Seiler. The Wind River real-time Linux runs on ARM and Xscale processors as well as PowerPC chips, the former dominating the cell phone handset business and the latter dominating the embedded computing market. Commercial Grade Linux 1.3 comes in three flavors. This will be the fourth release of the Carrier Grade Linux system that Wind River makes for telecommunication companies and network equipment providers; the third release of a more general real-time Linux aimed at aerospace, defense, and industrial embedded computing; and the second release of Linux for handsets. All three variants are based on the same code base and Linux 2.6.14 kernel and plug into the same Workbench tools created by Wind River. Because the company is relatively new to ruggedized Linux, it does not have legacy issues with Linux 2.2 or Linux 2.4, which turns out to be an advantage--just as being famous in embedded computing thanks to VxWorks is. The prior versions of the Wind River Linux platform were based on the Linux 2.6.10 kernel, which is getting kinda long in the tooth.

The handset and carrier grade variants of the 1.3 version have a new feature called the pre-emptive real-time patch, which offers finer granularity on processes running in the Linux kernel than the stock kernel has, which means it can reduce the latency on interrupt processes and therefore make Linux run smoother and be more responsive--something you want in a weapons system or a nuclear reactor. The handset variant of the Commercial Grade Linux 1.3 stack from Wind River also includes a fast-boot feature that allows a handset to boot in under five seconds, a small 4 MB memory footprint, and integrates into power management features in ARM and Xscale processors.

The carrier grade version of the 1.3 products is aimed at X86 and X64 servers, and specifically blade servers that adhere to the ACTA and Micro ACTA standards adopted by the telecom and service provider industry. Sieler says that Wind River will be the first company to register with Open Source Development Labs to say that it has met the Carrier Grade Linux 3.2 specification. This version of the Linux platform has hooks in it for clustering and fault tolerance, which is necessary for telco systems.

The general purpose variant of the Commercial Grade Linux 1.3 software does not include the pre-emptive real-time patch, and it runs on ARM, Xscale, MIPS, Power, X86, and X64 processors.

Wind River sells its products to developers, and it does not charge royalties when they embed the resulting Linuxes and code written using its Workbench tool into their own products. An annual license to an application developer package for Linux costs between $3,000 and $5,000 per developer seat, while a full-blown platform developer package costs from $11,000 to $15,000 per seat per year. When you license these products, you can develop using any of the three Linux variants you choose.

In addition to updating its Linux platform, Wind River also made a contribution of over 300,000 lines of code to four different areas at Eclipse: The C/C++ development tools (CDT) project, the platform project, the target management (TM) and device debugging (DD) sub-projects within the device software development platform (DSDP) project. The code was extracted from the company's latest Workbench 2.5 development tool, and helps make C and C++ work better inside the Eclipse integrated development environment, much as the contributions from the Java community to Eclipse have made Java programming better inside the Eclipse IDE. Wind River has eight software engineers working full time on integrating Workbench with Eclipse or donating code to Eclipse.

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