Wind River Systems


Wind River Systems, also known as Wind River, is an Alameda, California-based wholly owned subsidiary of TPG Capital. The company develops embedded system software consisting of run-time software, industry-specific software, simulation technology, development tools and middleware.

History

Wind River Systems was formed by a partnership of Jerry Fiddler and Dave Wilner. Until 1981, Fiddler had worked at Berkeley Lab writing software for control systems, and wanted to pursue a career in computer generated music, which he funded through a consultancy business focused on real-time operating systems. His early clients included the National Football League and film director Francis Ford Coppola, for whom he designed a unique film editing system. Wilner, a former colleague at Berkeley Lab, joined Fiddler to form Wind River Systems in 1983.
In 2009, Wind River was acquired by Intel. In 2018, Intel spun out its Wind River division, which was then acquired by TPG Capital.
The company's key milestones include:
Among the company's products are the VxWorks real-time operating system, the Wind River Linux operating system, and the Eclipse-based Wind River Workbench IDE. VxWorks began as an add-on to the VRTX operating system in the early 1980s. Wind River Workbench superseded the previous Tornado environment.

VxWorks

VxWorks is the original flagship product of Wind River. It is a real-time operating system intended for embedded and critical infrastructure devices and systems. It supports multicore processors, 32-bit and 64-bit, for several architectures including ARM®, Intel®, and Power® and has over one hundred board support packages for different hardware systems. VxWorks is a real time and deterministic operating system that is secure, safe, reliable, and certifiable.

Wind River Linux

Wind River's Linux product is source code and a build system that generate runtime images suitable for embedded devices. It supports a variety of architectures, including ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, IA32 and SPARC.
In 2004, Wind River announced a partnership with Red Hat to create a new Linux-based distribution for embedded devices. Wind River has since ended its partnership with Red Hat and now ships its own Linux distribution optimized for embedded Linux development.
Wind River released the first version of its embedded Linux distribution, Platform for Network Equipment - Linux Edition 1.0 in 2005. It was registered against the Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 specification and supported IA32 and PPC architectures. They added other platforms in subsequent releases, General Purpose Platform - Linux Edition starting in version 1.4. In 2013 Wind River announced Wind River Linux 6.0.
Wind River Systems acquired FSMLabs embedded technology in February 2007 and made a version available as Wind River Real-Time Core for Wind River Linux. As of August 2011, Wind River has discontinued the Wind River Real-Time Core product line, effectively ending commercial support for the RTLinux product.
On August 7, 2007, Palm Inc. announced that it had chosen Wind River Systems as the software solution for its Palm Foleo.
In 2008, Wind River announced cooperation with BMW, Intel and Magneti Marelli for development of a Linux-based open-source platform to control in-car electronics, which was extended in the GENIVI Alliance in 2009.
In 2012, Wind River introduced a new version of Wind River Linux that was developed from the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure and has achieved Yocto Project Compatible registration.

Helix Virtualization Platform

Wind River® Helix™ Virtualization Platform consolidates multi-OS and mixed-criticality applications onto a single edge compute software platform.

Wind River (Diab) Compiler

Wind River acquired Dataindustrier AB's Diab Compiler as part of its acquisition of Integrated Systems Inc. Originally designed by Wind River's former CTO, Tomas Evensen, it is now available as part of Wind River's VxWorks platforms. It can also be licensed separately for non-VxWorks users. The compiler supports PowerPC, ARM, MIPS, SH, ColdFire, TriCore, Intel, and more architectures.

Simics

was added to Wind River's product portfolio after the acquisition of Virtutech by Intel in 2010.

Wind River Titanium Cloud

Introduced in 2014, Wind River Titanium Cloud provides a Network Functions Virtualization infrastructure software platform used by network equipment suppliers to build NFV equipment and by communications service providers to deploy next generation edge computing services. The product is based on open source software, specifically the OpenStack project, StarlingX which includes components from various other open source projects such as: Ceph, DPDK, OpenStack, Linux, KVM, and Kubernetes. StarlingX is an edge, or distributed, cloud software infrastructure designed to meet computing needs for communications service providers as they evolve their networks to 5G.
Some of the key attributes of Titanium Cloud include:
Wind River® Edge Sync is an over-the-air update and software lifecycle management solution enabling auto manufacturers to remotely maintain the integrity of embedded systems, apply feature and performance enhancements, and collect and report critical data across the lifecycle of the vehicle.

Workbench

Wind River Workbench integrated development environment and set of tools for software running on Wind River platforms. It configures operating systems, analyzes and tunes software applications, and debugs entire systems.

Markets

Wind River's technologies are used in a wide range of markets including Aerospace & Defense, Automotive, Energy, Industrial, Medical, and Networking & Communications. The products are used in industrial and transportation systems such as factory automation, robotics, rail transport, smart grids; military systems such as unmanned vehicles and military communications, telecommunication infrastructure equipment such as routers; automotive systems such as connected in-vehicle infotainment, digital cluster displays, telematics, braking systems; consumer devices such as multifunction printers; digital cameras, projectors, set-top boxes, traffic signals aircraft and aerospace systems such as Mars rovers MER-A and MER-B.

Customers

Wind River sponsors the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium WonderCup Challenge, a San Francisco Bay Area science knowledge competition for high school students, Alameda Boys and Girls Club, and Oakland Leaf STEM Program.