Wind River Linux customers can now choose a continuous integration and continuous delivery model for access to updated releases every few weeks. Wind River also announced separate, async updates for containers and Linux.

Wind River has updated it Wind River Linux distribution with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) support. This optional “model” for subscribing to the commercial, but open source Yocto Linux based, embedded distro provides customers with new releases that can be downloaded every few weeks.

Designed for typically larger-scale customers that need to integrate Wind River Linux with their internal CI/CD platforms or build CI/CD enabled products for their own customers, the new release cadence will enable benefits like Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) management and improved technical support, says Wind River.

The new service leverages Wind River’s daily test and validation of Wind River Linux on “a variety of use cases relevant across industries.” In addition, the development and maintenance processes for Wind River releases are certified for quality under ISO 9001:2015. The releases are also compliant with OpenChain, the Linux Foundation project for streamlining open source compliance via a certification program.

Customers who “develop software on a fixed version of the Linux kernel due to tight restrictions around certifications, such as those creating medical systems,” can continue to work with Wind River Linux LTS yearly releases,” says Wind River.

Continuous integration and delivery best practices “contribute to a culture of continuous improvement by enabling teams to adopt, adapt, and implement small changes rapidly and reliably,” says the company. CI/CD is far more common in enterprise server software than on the edge. As container and cloud technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes start to migrate downward to high-end embedded edge servers, however, CI/CD is starting to migrate with them.

In Jan. 2019, Electric Cloud introduced embedded support for version 11.0 of its ElectricAccelerator build and test acceleration platform, adding out-of-the-box build support for Yocto Project, Buildroot, and Android Pie. Last month, a startup called FØCAL launched a FØCAL profiling and automated test farm platform for Linux hacker boards that integrates support for the CircleCI cloud-native CI/CD platform.

“In the 5G era, as companies are racing to innovate, they have a greater need for frequent software updates and nonstop security monitoring,” stated Michel Genard, vice president of product, Wind River. “Many update their software on a weekly basis, and some are updating applications every day or even hourly. Companies want a continuous stream of updated code and features from a trusted source.”

 
Updating containers for embedded

Wind River Linux already includes pre-built containers, tools, documentation, and support for frameworks such as Docker and Kubernetes. Now the distribution has added the capability to asynchronously update containers and the base OS separately. In other words, you don’t have to update or reboot the Linux stack every time you update a related container.

Wind River says that it has teamed with partners such as Percepio AB “to ensure that there is both an open source and a commercial ecosystem of tools that address the needs of Wind River Linux developers.” The Percepio Tracealyzer trace visualization tool, for example, “provides a large number of high-level views to make it easier to spot anomalies in program execution and to trace them to the root cause without requiring a great deal of Linux kernel expertise.”

Wind River also announced that its Eclipse-based Wind River Workbench for Linux LTS has added an application development environment for build, debug, and system analysis tools.

 
Further information

The latest Wind River Linux release with CI/CD support and more flexible container updates appears to be available now. Commercial versions vary in price, depending on selected services, and there’s a free version available on GitHub. More information may be found on the Wind River Linux product page.