Wind River Systems

Coordinates: 37°46′52″N 122°15′43″W / 37.78116°N 122.26195°W / 37.78116; -122.26195

Wind River Systems Inc.

Type	subsidiary
Founded	1981
Headquarters	Alameda, California
Key people	Barry Mainz, President
Revenue	US$359.7 million (FY ended Jan 31 2009) [1]
Employees	1,800+[2] (11/2012)
Parent	Intel
Website	www.windriver.com

Wind River Systems, Inc. is a company providing embedded systems, development tools for embedded systems, middleware, and other types of software. The company was founded in Berkeley, California in 1981 by Jerry Fiddler and David Wilner. On June 4, 2009, Wind River announced that Intel had bought the company for a reported $884 million.^[3] Wind River continues to exist as a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel.

Company

Wind River concentrates on middleware: software and operating systems for information appliances and devices. Their products are used in cellular phones, auto braking systems, routers, digital cameras, projectors, set-top boxes, traffic signals, Mars rovers MER-A and MER-B and more.

Among their flagship products are the VxWorks real-time operating system, the Wind River Linux operating system, and the Eclipse-based Wind River Workbench IDE. VxWorks began as an add-on to the VRTX operating system in the early 1980s. Wind River Workbench superseded the previous Tornado environment.

Wind River's head offices are located at 500 Wind River Way, Alameda, California. As of 2004, their strategic theme is device software optimization.

Competitors

As of 2009, their competitors include:

• DDC-I, Inc. makers of the Deos and HeartOS RTOSes
• Green Hills Software (makers of the INTEGRITY and velOSity RTOS)
• QNX Inc. (makers of the QNX Neutrino system)
• ENEA AB Inc. (makers of the Operating System Embedded or Enea OSE RTOS)
• LynuxWorks (makers of the LynxOS RTOS)
• SYSGO (makers of PikeOS RTOS and ELinOS)
• Mentor Graphics (makers of Nucleus RTOS)
• The real-time and embedded product lines of Microsoft (largely Windows CE and Windows NT Embedded)
• Various products based on Linux made by MontaVista, TimeSys and others.

History

Wind River Systems was formed by a partnership of Jerry Fiddler^[4] and Dave Wilner.^[5][6] In 1981, Fiddler had come out of Berkeley Labs^[7] to write software for control systems, but wanted to pursue a career in computer generated music,^[8] which he funded through a consultancy business focused on real-time. His early clients included the National Football League and film director Francis Ford Coppola — for whom he designed a unique film editing system.^[9] Wilner, a former colleague at Berkeley, joined Fiddler and they formed a partnership called Wind River Systems (named after Wind River, Wyoming, where Fiddler had vacationed that year). Wind River was incorporated in 1983, with each partner contributing $3,000 and a desk to the business.

Their most significant acquisition came in 1999 when they purchased one of their major competitors, Integrated Systems Inc., makers of pSOS. Wind River has since discontinued the pSOS product line and has recommended existing pSOS customers move to VxWorks.^{[citation needed]}

Products

VxWorks

VxWorks is the original product of Wind River. It is a real-time operating system intended for embedded devices. It runs on many architectures, and supports features such as SMP, IPv6, TIPC and memory protection.

Wind River Linux

Wind River's Linux product is source code and a build system that generate runtime images suitable for embedded devices. It supports a variety of architectures, including ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, IA32 and SPARC.

In 2004, Wind River announced a partnership with Red Hat to create a new Linux-based distribution for embedded devices.^[10] Wind River has since ended its partnership with Red Hat and now ships its own Linux distribution optimized for embedded Linux development.

Wind River released the first version of its embedded Linux distribution, Platform for Network Equipment - Linux Edition (PNE-LE) 1.0 in 2005.^[11] It was registered against the Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 specification and supported IA32 and PPC architectures. They added other platforms in subsequent releases, General Purpose Platform - Linux Edition (GPP-LE) and Platform for Consumer Devices - Linux Edition PCD-LE) starting in version 1.4.

On March 16, 2009, Wind River announced Wind River Linux 3.0.^[12]

On February 20, 2007, FSMLabs' embedded market was acquired by Wind River Systems. Wind River maintains the free versions of RTLinux previously offered by FSMLabs;^[13] and Wind River committed to continue to offer the FSMLab approach to RTLinux as part of their product line rebranded as Wind River Real-Time Core for Wind River Linux.

On August 7, 2007, Palm Inc. announced that it had chosen Wind River Systems as the software solution for its (later aborted) Palm Foleo.

In 2008, Wind River announced cooperation with BMW, Intel and Magneti Marelli for development of a Linux-based open-source platform to control in-car electronics,^[14] which was extended in the GENIVI Alliance in 2009.^[15]

BSD/OS

Wind River acquired the software assets of Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) in 2001. These comprised the BSD/OS operating system, plus involvement in the FreeBSD open source project.^[16] The FreeBSD unit was divested as a separate entity in 2002 as FreeBSD Mall, Inc.^[17]

Faced with competition from the open source FreeBSD and Linux-based operating systems, Wind River discontinued BSD/OS in December 2003. However, by this time some technology from BSD/OS had been contributed to the open source BSD community.^[18]

Wind River (Diab) Compiler

Wind River acquired Dataindustrier AB's Diab Compiler as part of its acquisition of Integrated Systems Inc.^{[citation needed]} Originally designed by Wind River's current CTO, Tomas Evensen, it is now available as part of Wind River's VxWorks platforms. It can also be licensed separately for non-VxWorks users. The compiler supports PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, SH, ColdFire, TriCore, Intel, and mcore architectures.

Tilcon Graphics Suite

Tilcon Software Limited was acquired by Wind River in 2009. The Tilcon software consists of a graphical user interface builder - a tool that runs on a Windows or Linux host - and a GUI engine that runs on an embedded processor that renders graphics through a number of different standard graphics libraries. The Tilcon software supports VxWorks, Linux and Windows operating systems.

Simics

The Simics full-system simulator was added to Wind River's product portfolio after the acquisition of Virtutech by Intel in 2010.

Acquisitions

• 1997: DSP Foundry (WiSP RTOS for Motorola DSP563xx family)
• 1999: Integrated Systems Inc.
• 2000: merge staff of Dragonfly Software Consulting
• 2000: Embedded Support Tools Corp. (ESTC)
• 2000: ICEsoft^[19] (Bergen, Norway)
• 2000: AudeSi Technologies Inc. (Calgary, Alberta, Canada)^[20]
• 2001: Eonic Systems (Virtuoso RTOS)
• 2001: Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI)
• 2005: ScopeTools business unit from Real-Time Innovations
• 2006: Interpeak AB^[21] (Stockholm, Sweden)
• 2007: Assets of FSMLabs (Socorro, New Mexico, United States)
• 2008: MIZI^[22] (Seoul, South Korea)
• 2009: Tilcon Software Limited^[23] (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)
• 2010: Virtutech (Stockholm, Sweden)
• 2011: Switch++ (Santa Clara, United States)

Sponsorship

Wind River sponsors the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium (BASIC) WonderCup Challenge, a San Francisco Bay Area science knowledge competition for high school students.

References

Further reading

• Lord of the Toasters an article from Wired magazine
• Wind River's Linux Transformation an article from CNET

External links

• Company page