Wind River is now shipping its integrated development environment (IDE) based on the Eclipse platform. Workbench 2.0 supports Linux, in-house embedded operating systems, and Wind River's proprietary VxWorks real-time operating system (RTOS) and Wind River hopes it will enable companies using multiple RTOSes to standardize on a single development environment.

One area where Linux is used in conjunction with legacy RTOSes more and more commonly is in telecommunications. Telecom equipment designers appear to be turning to Linux for its reliability and features in management and control applications, while still using legacy RTOSes such as VxWorks and Enea's OSE in simple data and signal processing blades with stringent real-time requirements. Research firm VDC and Linux standards body OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) both report growing Linux use in telecommunications, and number two telecom OS vendor Enea recently added a Linux compatibility layer to its OSE RTOS to enable it to work better in complex telecom systems running both Linux and OSE.

The telecommunications software market accounts for 30 percent of Wind River's business, down from 50 percent, but Wind River remains the leading telecommunications operating system software vendor.

Workbench 2.0

Workbench, formerly “Wind Power IDE 2.0,” is an open, standards-based software development environment based on the Eclipse platform for cross-vendor tools integration. According to Wind River, Workbench offers “deep tools capability,” and “broad coverage across every task and phase” in the develoment process.

The tool suite includes:

• Editor
  
• Code browser
  
• Project management and build tools
  
• CM integration
  
• Wind River debugger
  
• Wind River and GCC compiler support
  
• Wind River system viewer for system level runtime analysis
  
• Memory use, profiling, code coverage, execution trace, value tracking via RTI Scope Tools
  
• Simulation capability

The Eclipse platform's open architecture enables the integration of in-house or third-party tools, such as RTI's ScopeTools. RTI supports its ScopeTools as Eclipse add-ons for Workbench as well as MontaVista's DevRocket.

“Companies are demanding a development environment that supports multiple projects, target platforms, hosts, architectures, and languages. They also want the efficiencies gained by using that same environment throughout the development process,” said Chief Marketing Office Dave Fraser.

Wind River customer Convergent's VP of R&D Ilan Kepton stated, “Since standardizing our device software development process on Wind River Workbench, we have increased development efficiencies.”

Wind River will co-host a Webinar on June 30, with partner Red Hat, focusing on the Workbench tools and getting started with Linux device software development.

 
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