VxWorks

Through our consultancy and support work for our customers in the field we have also gained experience with less common environments not normally supported by the open-source community. VxWorks is one of these environments.

The combination of cross-compiling with specialized compilers and downloading to and execution on embedded hardware makes this OS an unlikely candidate for generic support by the community. Due to these special circumstances and the costs involved VxWorks support for ACE/TAO has fallen behind compared to other more widely used operating environments.

Starting November 2004 Remedy IT has been working on the VxWorks port of ACE/TAO. This work is being sponsored by a group of our customers that understood the need for commercial sponsoring to get the VxWorks port running again.

Starting early 2010 the port isn’t maintained anymore. Remedy IT is searching for renewed funding to revive the ACE/TAO port to VxWorks again. CIAO/DAnCE are candidates for porting to VxWorks RTP mode.

Due to the fact the GCC compiler version used by VxWorks 5.5.x is deprecated by the DOC-group in the course of 2007 we cannot provide a fixed price support option for this anymore. On customer request however we still can and will offer support for this platform with pricing based on customer requirements.

Sponsor benefits

Joining as sponsor will give you several benefits. The first and most important one is that we solve compile and test problems before you are starting to use VxWorks. Secondly we will assist sponsors in setting up a build/test environment at your site remotely. And last but not least we will fix any VxWorks specific problems in ACE/TAO without additional charges (excluded are generic ACE/TAO issues and project specific issues).

Support for non sponsors

Because the VxWorks port is a sponsored activity we can’t deliver free support to non sponsors. For non sponsors support can be given as part of our commercial support. At the moment you decide to become a sponsor we will help you to get ACE/TAO building on your systems.

Recommendation

Underneath you will find a recommendation from Douglas C. Schmidt, the inventor of ACE+TAO.

By Douglas C. Schmidt: VxWorks is an important platform for ACE+TAO since it is widely used in distributed real-time and embedded systems. Due to the effort and cost required to obtain licenses and support the many variants of Vxworks, the DOC group doesn’t have the resources to support VxWorks. ACE+TAO therefore do not run as effectively on this platform as on many other operating systems.

The proposed support plan from Remedy is an essential step to achieving solid VxWorks support for ACE+TAO. A notable aspect of Remedy’s support services is their timely commitment to folding their changes back into the main codebase of ACE+TAO, which helps ensure that future releases of ACE+TAO will continue to work well on VxWorks. I therefore heartily recommend their approach.

March 2011 status

The port of ACE/TAO to VxWorks isn’t maintained anymore from October 2009 due to lack of funding. The new CIAO and DAnCE implementations haven’t been ported at all to VxWorks and will need structural work to be ported.

September 2009 status

Remedy IT, announced the availability of TAO (The ACE ORB), the open source CORBA Object Request Broker (ORB), for Wind River’s VxWorks 6.7.

"Application developers need a high-performance portable CORBA solution for VxWorks," said Johnny Willemsen of Remedy IT. Remedy IT provides that solution with TAO as open source C++ ORB.

Remedy IT provides that solution with TAO as open source C++ ORB. The use of TAO has increased a lot over the last years, both from replacing commercial ORBs in existing projects as well as from new projects choosing CORBA as a middleware solution. Using CORBA our customers make the services of their VxWorks systems available to other environments like Windows and Linux hosts but also to other VxWorks hosts.

“We are pleased to see our partners maintain close alignment with our VxWorks roadmap” said Rob Hoffman, vice president and general manager, Aerospace and Defense, Wind River. “Expanding and proving our pre-integrated middleware solutions removes risk, time, and costs from our customer’s programs.”

As part of our services we validate ACE/TAO/CIAO for a specific customer environment and assist in configuring TAO for a specific use case. Both TAO and VxWorks have a large number of configuration options to optimize settings according to your project’s requirements and our staff has the know-how and experience to assist you in choosing the optimal configuration. In case the project is classified we provide a validation using the default settings.

The release of ACE/TAO/CIAO x.6.9 includes support for kernel and Real Time Process (RTP) user mode for Wind River VxWorks 6.7. GCC and Diab are both supported as cross compilers. This release is the most stable micro release of TAO currently available.

March 2009 status

With the release of x.6.8 we have validated ACE/TAO/CIAO for VxWorks 6.4 in RTP and kernel mode. The tests show good results for all major functionality. We have extended the number of builds on the scoreboard and keep working on improving the port to VxWorks 6.4. ACE/TAO/CIAO do compile with VxWorks 6.{5,6} but no runtime testing has been performed yet.

The upcoming x.6.9 release will also compile with VxWorks 6.7, but no runtime testing has been performed. Because of lack of funding the support for VxWorks 5.5.x, and 6.{0,1,2,3} has been removed from this version.

The x.6.{6,7,8} version supports shared libraries for VxWorks 6.3 in kernel mode. Because of lack of funding also this support will be removed from x.6.9.

Through our commercial support services we will deliver support for already released versions. If required deprecated ports can be revived when new sponsoring is raised.