OS-Agnostic Software Development with Wind River Studio

Wind River Studio is a flexible, cloud-native DevOps platform that allows OEMs to leverage existing development tools to accelerate time to market.

We will demonstrate how developers can create an application software seamlessly leveraging Wind River Studio Developer and Visual Studio Marketplace tools for two different real-time operating systems, for example QNX and VxWorks from Wind River. We will also illustrate how multiple operating systems can run side-by-side thanks to Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform.

This example is a simple change to an automotive body control application — adjusting the turn indicator blink rate from one thousand milliseconds to two hundred milliseconds — but the same process would work for more complicated systems, including ADAS applications.

We have Wind River Studio Developer installed, so to get started in QNX, we install the QNX extension for VS Code from Visual Studio Marketplace. We build the application for QNX, and then we use Wind River Studio Virtual Lab to reserve the physical target and upload the applications to run tests.

We can also add some performance measures and debugging criteria using Wind River Studio in between specific targets and the developer’s PC. We see that it works on the physical target, so we can stop the test and measure performance. 

Now we can commit this change and push the new source code into GitLab — the code repository built into Wind River Studio. This push triggers Studio Pipelines to build and verify the code, starting Coverity tests, integration tests and qualification tests.

Once requirements are verified, the new source code is released to GitLab. To do the same thing in VxWorks, we download the VxWorks SDK from Wind River Studio, stored in Artifactory, and install the SDK on the developer’s PC. 

We build the application and then test it using Wind River Studio Virtual Lab, reserving a physical target to run the tests — in this case, the turn indicator. We see that it runs on the physical target, which is now blinking at the updated rate.

With Wind River Studio, all of this can be executed from a single platform, without migrating existing applications to a new operating system, saving developers integration time and reducing development costs.

On the vehicle, both operating systems can run side-by-side thanks to Wind River Helix Virtualization Platform, which enables virtualization to ensure freedom of interference so OEMs can get the most out of compute without compromising performance.