Virtutech, Inc., the leader in
virtualized systems development (VSD), today announced that Wind River has successfully deployed the
Simics simulation platform for development of both its
Wind River Hypervisor and secure
VxWorks MILS Platform. With Virtutech Simics as the foundation for its complex and challenging development projects, Wind River adopted more iterative, flexible processes that meet the demands of developing advanced run-times for multicore and multi-OS applications.
“With both Wind River Hypervisor and the VxWorks MILS Platform, Simics enabled Wind River to leverage capabilities like system checkpointing and reverse execution, while providing complete visibility inside a complex software image,” said Michel Genard, vice president of marketing, Virtutech, Inc. “While Wind River is well known as a developer of innovative software solutions and developer tools, including Wind River Workbench, it should also be recognized for adopting agile development processes that will change the way companies conduct their businesses.”
Wind River initially licensed Virtutech Simics three years ago as the simulation platform for the Freescale 8641D. A year later, the company turned to Simics as the development platform for its two most intricate projects: its multicore-capable hypervisor software and the development of its MILS architecture secure platform. Simics provided a standard PowerPC/Intel platform as the foundation layer so Wind River developers could go directly to developing code for their hypervisor technology, significantly cutting the time it took to develop the firmware, hardware and tools required for running a wide variety of embedded operating systems.
“Whether you are building the core hardware, OS or surrounding architecture, multicore technology is so disruptive that companies really must do things differently,” said Marcus Levy, president of the Multicore Association. “Wind River hypervisor technology is another example of a company deploying Virtualized Systems Development as the ‘must have’ development foundation for sophisticated multicore environments.”
For its new secure VxWorks MILS Platform, Simics helped Wind River to quickly develop “what-if” use cases, build the complex test cases needed for any secure application development and port from one architecture in a matter of days instead of months.
“The Simics technology is an essential technology component to develop our advanced run-times such as Wind River Hypervisor and VxWorks MILS,” said Emeka Nwafor, director of product management, Wind River. “Our experience has been that applying VSD has improved the effectiveness of our development and testing activities and streamlined the development of these intricate run-times. This has been beneficial in managing the same schedule and cost pressures that our customers face.”