Wind River Having a Real Time With Linux

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Wind River is taking a page from its competitor’s playbook.

The company is incorporating real-time patches into its latest Wind River Linux releases a la MontaVista Linux.

Today, Wind River is releasing its fourth Linux release since 2004, with new
1.3 versions of the Wind River General Purpose Platform, Platform for
Consumer Devices and Platform for Network Equipment.

And it’s not only taking from the open source community. It’s also giving back in the form of a 300,000 line code donation to the Eclipse Foundation.

Apparently Wind River’s Linux efforts are quite literally “taking off” as
well, thanks to a deal with Boeing.

It’s all part of the continued growth of Linux adoption and development by
Wind River, which only began shipping Linux solutions in 2004 as a complement to its proprietary
VxWorks-embedded operating system.

“We’re no longer playing catch up,” Glenn Seiler, product line manager, Linux Platforms, told internetnews.com. “We’re establishing a leadership
position.”.

Seiler claims Wind River is the first embedded OS vendor to use the 2.6.14 kernel.

Wind River’s Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition 1.3, is also one
of the first to be Carrier Grade Linux 3.2-registered.

With its new releases, Wind River is however playing a bit of catch up with
its main competitor in the embedded Linux space, MontaVista Linux.

Since October of 2004, MontaVista had been developing and
promoting real-time enhancements for Linux.

By August 2005, MontaVista was claiming
“breakthroughs” for real-time Linux. At the time, John Fanelli, vice president of product planning and management for Wind River, told internetnews.com that he wouldn’t characterize “real-time Linux from MontaVista” as a competitive threat.”

Times do change. And open source does seem to make for some strange
bedfellows.

Wind River’s 1.3 Linux releases include a preempt real-time
patch, which provides for a much higher degree of granularity in kernel
preemption and better interrupt response times.

“It is essentially the same work that MontaVista started a while back,”
Seiler said.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.