Wind River Systems, Inc., also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an Alameda, California–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops embedded system and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems 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. On January 11, 2022, Wind River announced that it was acquired by Aptiv, an auto parts company, for $4.3 billion in cash. The company's key milestones include:

Products

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 Wind River Workbench superseded the previous Tornado environment.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 (RTOS) 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 (BSPs) for different hardware systems. VxWorks is a real time and deterministic operating system.

Wind River Linux

Wind River's Linux product is source code and a build system that generate runtime images suitable for embedded devices. Historically, Wind River Linux has supported a variety of architectures, including ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, IA32 and SPARC. The current release of Wind River Linux supports a variety of ARM, IA32, and IA64 platforms with both standard and realtime (PREEMPT RT) kernels. Wind River charges a subscription to provide commercial bug and CVE fixes for their Linux products. Pricing is project-based, with a flat fee for each solution built on top of Wind River Linux. There is no per-device subscription or royalty. The key capabilities for Wind River Linux are 10 year commercial support life, complete customization including kernel changes, reproducible customizations, wide range of hardware support through Board Support Packages (BSP) that are ported, maintained, and tested by Wind River.

Early history

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 (PNE-LE) 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 (GPP-LE) and Platform for Consumer Devices - Linux Edition PCD-LE) 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 it would use Wind River Systems Linux for its (later aborted) 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.

Yocto Project

In 2012, Wind River introduced a version of Linux that was developed from the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure and achieved Yocto project compatible registration. All subsequent releases of Wind River Linux are based on the Yocto Project.

Wind River Linux release history

Wind River has historically released a new Wind River Linux LTS (Long Term Support) about every year that are generally based on the then current Linux Kernel LTS release and the latest Yocto Project release.

Wind River Linux Distro

In 2022, Wind River launched a new product, Wind River Linux Distro, that is a binary Linux distribution based on the Wind River Linux source-based product. The Distro is intended for embedded solution developers that need a commercially supported Linux for their project, but do not need the extensive customization capabilities of the Yocto Project-based Wind River Linux. The key features are quick time to value, customization via tools such as the Linux Assembly Tool & an RPM package feed, and updates via OSTree. Developers can download a free version of the Wind River Linux Distro by going to https://www.windriver.com/products/linux/download A number of hardware platforms are enabled by the Distro. Commercial support is currently available for a subset of the enabled platforms.

Simics

Simics is a full-system simulator used by software developers to simulate the hardware of complex electronic systems.

Wind River Studio

Wind River Studio is a cloud-native platform for the deployment and servicing of mission-critical intelligent edge systems.

Acquisitions