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Wind River Linux
- saghm 3y agoI first mentally parsed this domain as "win driver" and thought it might be something providing some sort of compatibility with Windows
- userbinator 3y agoIf it weren't for the title, I would've thought it's one of those hugely-popular-and-sometimes-shady sites with huge collections of Windows device driver downloads.
- peterhull90 3y agoThere is such a thing[0] - at one time I was using both and it made my poor head spin a bit. [0]: https://jungo.com/windriver/ https://jungo.com/windriver/
- vkdelta 3y agoIs this still being used? I remember having to license montavista during days of TI gateway chips.
- hhh 3y agoYes. I have encountered over a dozen pieces of (non-legacy) hardware running wind river in the past 12 months alone.
- xcrunner529 3y agoWhat would be the alternative?
- rho138 3y agoSo many IOT devices are slinging this garbage can.
- omgmajk 3y agoYes, this runs in a lot of automotive embedded devices. Since Aptiv owns it now, I don't see it going away anytime soon.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y agoA powerful three word phrase that summons forth buried trauma for many. May the ignorant be so lucky as to continue enjoying their bliss.
- cryptichash 3y agocould you explain why a little more? [background: though wind river got bought by aptiv... paid a pretty penny for it]
- bluGill 3y agoWind river is also behind vxworks which is scary to some
- bigiain 3y agoVxWorks has a reputation, for which I have no great feel for whether or not it's deserved. But to their credit, it's running on Mars, on (at least) Pathfinder, Spirit, Curiosity, and Opportunity. Meeting, and in most cases seriously exceeding planned mission lifetimes, earns VxWorks some serious kudos from me.
- lloeki 3y agoI remember doing some coding on VxWorks during my engineering school. From my then limited experience it was an oddball but also as my first exposure to hard real time programming it sure was approachable and reliable as fuck. Definitely not surprised it was picked for space stuff. Comparatively, toying with RT Linux was obscure and full of duct-tape and footguns. I wish I had a chance to try and code on QNX beyond merely booting that magical 3.5" floppy.
- bigiain 3y agoOh man! That QNX floppy was _so_ awesome. (I wonder how it'd stack up today? Surely an ESP32 has more compute grunt than anything that QNX demos ran on back in the '90s, I wonder if anybody has ported it?)
- bb88 3y agoWhy is this on the front page? This has been out there for over a decade now.
- zamadatix 3y agoComplete finger in the wind guess: Someone in the HarmonyOS post mentioned Wind River Linux next to RTLinux about an hour before this was posted. A lot of people remember Wind River from VxWorks but I'm not sure as many realized they moved on to real time Linux many years ago. Someone saw, posted. That or simply coincidence for the same reason :). Also the HN title is actually edited and accidentally implies the wrong thing. Wind River Linux is a source only solution which has been around ages while what this page actually links to ,Wind River Linux Distro (launched in 2022), is a binary distro for certain platforms. Finger in the wind guessing says probably not the intended reason for posting given the title messes up the distinction though.
- keyle 3y agoAside: does anyone else see that hero picture and automatically know it's an AI generated pic? I seem to be developping a sixth sense for these things.
- agentgumshoe 3y agoNah, obviously she just likes wearing glasses that sit at a funny angle...
- drpixie 3y agoNo idea but it did generate a reaction ... Is she a Hollywood spy/hacker? What system she breaking into? (Maybe it's the dark scene and backlighting :) )
- jmclnx 3y agoInteresting, I did not know Wind River was still around, never mind producing a Linux Distro.
- aetherspawn 3y agoSigh, we buy their compilers for our clients on a monthly basis because the PPC and ARM support in GCC and Clang is still quite primitive. The WR compiler generates code that is on average about 50% smaller and 30% faster last time we checked circa 2020, and it is ISO 26262 certified for a safety application.
- aidenn0 3y agoDidn't Intel buy them at some point?
- qohen 3y agoIntel bought them in 2009. Then, in 2018 they were sold to TPG. And in 2020, to Aptiv. (From the "Our History" section of this page: https://www.windriver.com/company https://www.windriver.com/company ) Aptiv PLC is the automotive tech company that grew out of the GM spin-off, Delphi Automotive Systems, btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptiv
- pkasting 3y agoHave you done benchmarks against other competitors? I ask because twenty years ago I used to work for Green Hills' compiler team, and we were very proud of our optimizer at the time (versus both gcc and wind river). That said, I worked on mips and various other chips, not ppc or arm.
- vegetablepotpie 3y ago[flagged]
- voakbasda 3y agoIn a past job, I had to pick up and maintain an embedded system running Wind River Linux. Their build system was a complete dumpster fire. I have never seen a bigger pile of unorthodox custom build scripts. I would never touch their products again.
- tux2bsd 3y ago[dead]
- posborne 3y agoFrom my experience (from a few years back but still appears to be the case) is that Wind River is just wrapping Yocto these days. There could be value for some orgs where they don't have engineering teams if they do a contracting arrangement but I think, generally, orgs are better building directly on Yocto (or BuildRoot) without a vendor in the middle (other than your SoC vendor and their support layers). I'd save your money and pay for a seasoned embedded linux expert or three if you are maintained a connected product. For smaller deployments, I think it makes more sense to look into solutions like mender.io, etc. for updates/fleet mgmt/etc.
- shiroiuma 3y ago>orgs are better building directly on Yocto (or BuildRoot) without a vendor in the middle Going on a tangent here, but does anyone else also agree that BuildRoot is much, much nicer to work with as a dev than Yocto? I've had to work with both and BuildRoot was easy, just like building a Linux kernel with 'make menuconfig', whereas Yocto was downright painful.
- usr1106 3y agoNot a real expert with those systems, but I have used both. I believe buildroot is much smaller (as in much less binaries can be built) than Yocto. Yocto has its learning curve, but there is a lot readily available and you can do a lot more. It's extensible by desgn. You can build basically everything, but not without understanding the principles by just searching a few odd SO answers. I have used buildroot for an initramfs. If you have configured a kernel before, you get going in an afternoon.
- i_am_a_peasant 3y agoI worked with Yocto for about 8 years and about as much with buildroot. They both get the job done but I find that yocto recipes are more tractable. You see clearly what comes from the main git tree and what patches a vendor adds on top. I've seen some really ugly chimeras built with buildroot as a base..
- dezgeg 3y ago
- kazinator 3y agoIn the 2006-2009 timeframe, I worked at a company where I replaced this unwieldy monstrosity with a from-scratch distro + toolchain. It was an incremental approach. For a while, we kept running Wind River, but I replaced glibc with one I built completely not using anything from Wind River, and eventually all packages, config files and scripts in rootfs, and the kernel, until there was nothing left of Wind River. At that time, those WR clowns hadn't figured out how to build a cross-compiled Bash that had job control. Everyone was relieved when they could use Ctrl-Z suspend and fg/bg on the target with our home spun package. Funny thing is, that startup spent about a year looking for someone to do all this, while I worked on some C++ application stuff. Then they realized the person works there already. Didn't Wind River have some awful build process that stitched together files from disparate fragments? Or something? My memories are fuzzy. On this project, I had the idea of doing all patching of packages with Quilt. Yocto does that now. Years later when I had to add some patch to a Yocto package, I went into the build directory and, oh, lookie, I already know how to do this with my eyes closed. I made ever single package cleanly cross-compile for MIPS: no Qemu on the build machine. A co-op student came on board, who was into Macs; he pretty easily got everything to build under MacOS.
- i_am_a_peasant 3y agoI actually worked on the Wind River Linux team for a couple of years. The distro as a whole is not bad actually. Especially since it switched to Yocto. I found that most of the actual issues we were having were due to the BSPs we were pulling in from other vendors. And WRL supported/probably still does _a lot_ of BSPs from _a lot_ of vendors for _a lot_ of architectures. There are not that many commercially supported _embedded_ linux distributions. And WRL worked quite well for the vast majority of its customers. And I am proud to have had the honor of working with a lot of smart people there too. My favorite part of the whole experience was that when breakage did happen, it was super quick to fix and get it into mainline. It was the first time I saw such a streamlined release process. Other companies had a release process so convoluted that it would take over half a year for a fix of mine to reach the customer.
- dilyevsky 3y agoI did recall vxworks BSPs were of worse quality compared to QNX. QNX had way fewer of the boards supported tho
- i_am_a_peasant 3y agoWhich QNX bsps were you working on? my experience has been that they're a total dumpster fire and you're better of rewriting 90%
- dilyevsky 3y agoVarious Freescale boards (ppc). That was like 15 years ago at this point so maybe totally stale information
- i_am_a_peasant 3y agoI think Freescale holds the record of errata manual thickness :))
- i_am_a_peasant 3y ago
- gbraad 3y agoWhat do they mean with 'a binary distribution'... No source? Also, what do they utilize from FCOS?