Wind River sees a Linux future for devices

Last week, I wrote about the Nokia 770, the mobile phone maker's Linux-based Internet tablet appliance. Although the device has its rough edges, open source allowed Nokia to bring it to market quickly at an attractive price point. It's a lesson that hasn't been lost on the broader embedded systems market, including established vendors such as Wind River. 

"I like to think that we're actually the 800-pound gorilla, if you will, in the device software space," says Wind River product manager Glenn Seiler. According to Seiler, Wind River is the only vendor that's consistently strong in all the device markets, including not just consumer devices but military, aerospace, industrial automation, networking, and automotive as well.

Wind River's RTOS (real-time operating system), called VxWorks, is widely used in mission-critical embedded applications, and has even powered NASA's Mars Exploration Rover vehicles. But even though it has enjoyed success competing against other RTOSes, Wind River can't ignore the changing realities of the embedded systems market.

"What we're seeing now is that the trends that occurred in the enterprise, back in the early '90s, now those same trends are starting to happen in embedded," Seiler says.

Those trends, he says, boil down to "better, faster, cheaper." Customers want the flexibility to adopt new technologies quickly for faster times-to-market. And perhaps more significantly, they want freedom from royalty-based licensing schemes, which drive up the unit costs of their products. As happened in the server and workstation markets, more and more device manufacturers are casting their eyes toward Linux.

That's why in 2003 Wind River launched its riskiest initiative to date: a complete Linux product offering, marketed on equal footing with VxWorks. Wind River even developed tools to help customers migrate from RTOSes -- including VxWorks -- to Linux. So far, the strategy seems to be a success.

"What we're seeing is that the device software market itself is growing significantly, somewhere around 30 percent," Seiler says. "The RTOS market is actually growing by 30 to 40 percent, and [our version of] Linux is growing at an even faster pace."

Whereas enterprise Linux vendors such as Novell and Red Hat focus primarily on mainstream x86 processors, Wind River's Linux offering is more specialized. It puts equal emphasis on ARM-compatible chips such as Intel's XScale, which are popular for portable devices, as well as on the PowerPC chips used in networking equipment. And, critical for the device market, Wind River keeps it small.

"It's still open source Linux, but what we've done is added certain patches and certain functionality to enhance the boot time and also to enhance the footprint. And by enhance, I mean get it smaller; so you can actually get the footprint down to around 1 MB," Seiler says.

But not everyone is equally bullish on the trend toward embedded Linux. Top competitor Green Hills Software, for example, has made it clear that it won't be following in Wind River's footsteps, and has even issued a number of anti-Linux white papers in the past.

Someday, however, it may find it has no choice. The embedded market is no longer simply about selling operating systems. Instead, the buzz today is all about DSO (device software optimization). Vendors such as Wind River aim to offer complete solutions, including development tools and support services relating to the OS so that customers can develop, run, and manage device software faster and more efficiently.

If you're thinking that idea sounds suspiciously like the business models of some prominent open source vendors you know, then Wind River is way ahead of you.