DO YOU CVE WHAT I CVE?

David Reyna, one of the Senior Technical Staff at Wind River Systems, is a veteran of the embedded computing world, with over 20 years of experience. He’s involved with Yocto Project (see tutorials LXF251) and develops workflow and optimisation tools for Linux. His work began with digital radiography and most recently involves management tools for software vulnerabilities.

Wind River is a leader in the embedded space, being one of few companies that can claim its code is running on Mars. David gave a talk on this at the Linux Foundation’s Embedded Linux Conference in Edinburgh in October 2018, and was good enough to take the time to share some of his wisdom with our own suspected Martian-in-residence.

Linux Format: Wind River has been around for a long time – almost as long as I have, in fact (blimey – Ed). Could you tell us a bit about the early days of the company, and how your real-time OS (RTOS) called VxWorks came about?

David Reyna: Yep, we’ve been around since the ’80s. We were embedded since before embedded was a thing. We were in IoT before IoT was a thing.

I should say that I wasn’t around in the early days – I joined Wind River in 2000. But I know some of the history, so here goes… Wind River started at UC Berkeley, back when people were just starting with embedded systems. There were a few other companies doing similar work – Vertex was one of them and there were a couple of other small ones. The difficulty was that there was no operating system for embedded devices.

So Wind River decided to move into that industry and provide an OS with some key features. The main one was [being] real-time, that was a real distinguishing factor. It didn’t just need to run, it needed to have response, provability, latency, all those kind of things.

That’s why they started more or less in the real-time world. It had to be modular, and that was quite a challenge. You couldn’t just start with Windows and add stuff or take stuff away. You had to