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AS OF 7/4/2008 8:36PM EST
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July 15, 2007 —
Device developers looking for a way to add networking capabilities to their creations may find a recent announcement from Wind River Systems interesting. The company released in June its Advanced Networking Technologies middleware portfolio, incorporating the company’s base of networking tools with technology acquired through its purchase of Interpeak AB in March 2006.
Wind River’s goal with the networking portfolio is to simplify application development for both its VxWorks and Wind River Linux platforms, by providing a common support platform for network functions, including IPv6, management, quality of service, routing, security and cryptography, and wireless networking.
Isidro Gonzalez, senior product marketing manager at Wind River, outlined the challenges facing developers: “Devices in general are becoming more and more about providing rich content; there’s serious network convergence,” he explained. “You have competitive pressures, so you want to have a differentiated product, but time-to-revenue is important, cost is important,” he added.
However, if making developers’ lives easier is a priority, so is making it easier to deploy and control embedded systems. Gonzalez noted that device management is still primitive: “The embedded device industry is where the IT industry was 15 years ago, before you had OpenView and Tivoli. We want to make this more efficient, so that customers can optimize their business investment, their people and their tools.”
According to the company, there were a number of reasons to replace the native Linux networking stack. Its goals were to add features necessary for the embedded device market, reduce the memory footprint of the stack, retain intellectual property, and support the deployment of applications on non-Linux platforms, particularly VxWorks. The challenge for Wind River was how to accommodate these requirements, while supporting the standard Linux networking APIs. As it turned out, explained Gonzalez, Interpeak’s technology slotted in nicely to Wind River’s overall strategy of device software optimization.
From a VxWorks perspective, the company claims that the new networking stack is 20 percent smaller than the default configuration of the previous (3.x) version, a boon for developers working in resource-constrained environments.
The new VxWorks 6.5 offers Wind River Advanced Networking Technologies as a built-in feature; they are also built into the company’s Platforms 3.5 series of packages for automotive, consumer and industrial devices and network equipment, as well as general-purpose applications. Users running older VxWorks 6.x or Platforms 3.x setups can also make use of the technology, as an add-on component. A single add-on bundle, Wind River Advanced Networking Technologies for Linux, is available for Wind River Linux 1.5 and earlier releases.
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