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Technology Stocks : Wind River going up, up, up! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7764)	5/11/2000 7:46:00 PM
From: James Connolly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10309

Allen, I am interested in your view of the OS roadmap that WIND presented at the end of Feb. In particular: 1. Do you think there are any risks associated with the "Cirrus", "Stratus" and "Cumulus" transitions. a). Issues that might arise executing the plan. b) Some smaller RTOS companies seem to see this as some kind of opportunity to pick up some pSOS business. Perhaps they are just looking to feed on the crumbs that might fall from the WIND table or is there more to it than that ? 2. What is the real significance of the enhancements like domain technology for memory protection, application isolation and high availability. Is WIND targeting new areas/devices with these enhancements ? Sounds like these features could be useful in the single CPU "ideal QCOM" phone. 3. Is it correct to say that IxWorks is outside and separate to the VxWorks/pSOS Cirrus, Stratus, Cumulus convergence ? Wind River Unveils Unified Product and Business Strategy wrs.com "The next version of the Tornado development environment and VxWorks RTOS, code-named project "Cirrus," will be available by Q3 2000 and will form the foundation of Wind River?s operating system and IDE platform. It will support all leading host systems, including Linux. Cirrus will also include protection domain technology for memory protection and application isolation as well as features for high availability. The next generation of the pRISM IDE and pSOS RTOS will be code named project "Stratus" and will be available by Q3 2000. Stratus will feature runtime enhancements including memory protection and compatibility with the latest Diab / SDS releases. Following Stratus and Cirrus, Wind River will converge to a single RTOS and IDE that combines the best of both operating systems, called "Cumulus". It will be available in 2001 and will include all the features of Cirrus as well as advanced high availability, enhanced connectivity for distributed computing, increased Java programmability, and enhanced features from the SNIFF+ development tool. In addition, Cumulus will include support for the pSOS API and other characteristics unique to the pSOS operating system." Regards JC.

To: Allen Benn who wrote (7764)	5/18/2000 7:49:00 AM
From: Anthony Tran	Respond to of 10309

Allen, This is a discussion between Matt Belkin and Ning comparing QNX and Wind. I received the exchange e-mail since I subscribed on the Gratis-Wind e-group. Could you please comment on it? Thank. Anthony Matt, While pSOS has some of the features VxWorks lacks, it does not have a microkernel or process model. Although pSOS and VxWorks have their own strengths and weaknesses, they are in the same class of old RTOSes that lack advanced features I mentioned. Furthermore, pSOS is dead. WRS's roadmap show that pSOS will be "merged" with VxWorks in the next version of OS after Cirrus (I forgot the code name). This merged OS is just a Cirrus with pSOS API for backward compatibility. If you need more convincing that WRS is not enhancing pSOS beyond one more bug-fix release, just ask WRS's marketing or sales when they will release TMS, Tornado or anything else for pSOS. I doubt any new customers will choose pSOS. I am dismissing the potential of VxWorks. I think there is a healthy market for VxWorks. All I was trying to say is that VxWorks will not be the standard OS for Cisco, and unlikely to be the standard OS for other high-end network equipment vendors. Traditionally, there are two kinds of networking equipment: the fast kind in the core of network that does very little processing on the packets, such as switches, and complex kind at edges of the network, such as routers, firewalls and many kinds of gateways. Now people want equipment that's fast and complex. Today's fastness means optical speed (100Gb) and today's complexity ranges from policy based routing and traffic engineering to virus scans and application level load balancing. Cisco's recent acquisition of ArrowPoint is an evidence of the explosive growth in fast-and-complex networking equipment market. In the ArrowPoint case, you control the layer 2 behaviors based on information in the layer 5 through 7. How do you do that? You put packet processing of higher network layers in silicon (contrasting to the traditional switches, such as TMS, that only allow layer 2 processing to be down in silicon), and you run ever more complex control software on host CPUs. Therefore, the modern networking equipment demands more of advanced features commonly found on server or desktop OSes, such as Unix, and less of absolute real-time response of traditional RTOSes, such as VxWorks. In fact, embedded OS is more appropriate here than real-time OS. I am not saying that advanced OS features and real-timeness are mutually exclusive. QNX showed us that you can have both. The bottom line is that the networking market is moving towards OSes with advanced features. Ning -----Original Message----- From: Matt Belkin [mailto:mattb@egroups.net] Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 4:20 PM To: gratis-wind@egroups.com Subject: [gratis-wind] QNX and explosive growth Ning, you make good points, but neglect to mention that pSOS does offer many of these features. Accordingly, ISI was gaining considerable momentum in datacom/telecom pre-merger. Secondly, while VxWorks had some of the feature limitations you note, Wind (pre-merger) was focusing on the significantly more profitable application layer with new products like TMS. Herein lies a key element of the "explosive" growth opportunity as Microsoft has taught us far too well. -----Original Message----- From: ning2m [mailto:ning2m@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 1:31 PM To: gratis-wind@egroups.com Subject: RE: [gratis-wind] Re: What's in it for Cisco? Peter, QNX has microkernel, process model, dynamically loadable modules and device drivers, transparent distributed processing and many other features that are lacking in VxWorks. For years, some people have been arguing against putting such features in RTOS for performance and footprint reasons. As hardware gets more powerful and software gets more complex, the arguments are no longer valid, especially for the networking equipment. Cirrus will have microkernel and process model (which WRS calls Protection Domain). I don't know enough about Cirrus to discuss other features but I doubt Cirrus, which is version 1.0 of WRS's new RTOS, will have the richness, maturity and the stability of QNX. If you consider the current IOS as an OS, it's a very crude one--hardly more than a dispatching loop. It doesn't even have preemptive multitasking (it has cooperative multitasking, similar to Windows 2.0). I don't know the origin but suspect it was largely home grown. Ning -----Original Message----- From: peters01@yahoo.com [mailto:peters01@yahoo.com] Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 12:00 PM To: gratis-wind@egroups.com Subject: [gratis-wind] Re: What's in it for Cisco? Ning- You state that Ciscos next generation IOS is based on QNX. What is the current generation based on ? What properties does QNX have that Cirrus needs to have to compete ? Peter Sullivan