Green Hills Software is a privately owned company that builds

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s and

programming tool A programming tool or software development tool is a computer program that software developers use to create, debug, maintain, or otherwise support other programs and applications. The term usually refers to relatively simple programs, that can b ...

s for

embedded system An embedded system is a computer system—a combination of a computer processor, computer memory, and input/output peripheral devices—that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system. It is ''embedded ...

s. The firm was founded in 1982 by Dan O'Dowd and Carl Rosenberg. Its world headquarters are in

Santa Barbara, California Santa Barbara ( es, Santa Bárbara, meaning " Saint Barbara") is a coastal city in Santa Barbara County, California, of which it is also the county seat. Situated on a south-facing section of coastline, the longest such section on the West ...

History

Green Hills Software and

Wind River Systems Wind River Systems, 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, ...

enacted a 99-year contract as cooperative peers in the embedded software engineering market throughout the 1990s, with their relationship ending in a series of lawsuits throughout the early 2000s. This resulted in their opposite parting of ways, whereupon Wind River devoted itself to publicly embrace

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

and

open-source software Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. ...

but Green Hills initiated a public relations campaign decrying its use in issues of national security. In 2008, the Green Hills

real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which m ...

(RTOS) named Integrity-178 was the first system to be certified by the

National Information Assurance Partnership The National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) is a United States government initiative to meet the security testing needs of both information technology consumers and producers that is operated by the National Security Agency (NSA), and was ...

(NIAP), composed of

National Security Agency The National Security Agency (NSA) is a national-level intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). The NSA is responsible for global monitoring, collecti ...

(NSA) and

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...

(NIST), to Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+. By November 2008, it was announced that a commercialized version of Integrity 178-B will be available to be sold to the private sector by Integrity Global Security, a subsidiary of Green Hills Software. On March 27, 2012, a contract was announced between Green Hills Software and

Nintendo is a Japanese multinational video game company headquartered in Kyoto, Japan. It develops video games and video game consoles. Nintendo was founded in 1889 as by craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi and originally produced handmade playing cards ...

. This designates MULTI as the official

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...

and toolchain for Nintendo and its licensed developers to program the

Wii U The Wii U ( ) is a home video game console developed by Nintendo as the successor to the Wii. Released in late 2012, it is the first eighth-generation video game console and competed with Microsoft's Xbox One and Sony's PlayStation 4. ...

video game console A video game console is an electronic device that outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can be played with a game controller. These may be home consoles, which are generally placed in a permanent location connected to ...

. On February 25, 2014, it was announced that the operating system Integrity had been chosen by Urban Aeronautics for their AirMule flying car

unmanned aerial vehicle An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controll ...

(UAV), since renamed the

Tactical Robotics Cormorant The Tactical Robotics Cormorant, formerly AirMule or Mule, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) codename Pereira (shapiyriyt; ': Dragonfly), is a flying car unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) built by Tactical Robotics Ltd., a subsidiary of designer Rafi Yoel ...

Selected products

Real-time operating systems

Integrity Integrity is the practice of being honest and showing a consistent and uncompromising adherence to strong moral and ethical principles and values. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions. In ...

is a

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming in ...

(RTOS). An Integrity variant, named Integrity-178B, was certified to

Common Criteria The Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (referred to as Common Criteria or CC) is an international standard ( ISO/IEC 15408) for computer security certification. It is currently in version 3.1 revision 5. Common Criteria ...

Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 6+, High Robustness in November 2008. Micro Velosity (stylized as ''µ-velOSity'') is a real-time

microkernel In computer science, a microkernel (often abbreviated as μ-kernel) is the near-minimum amount of software that can provide the mechanisms needed to implement an operating system (OS). These mechanisms include low-level address space management, ...

for resource-constrained devices.

Compilers

Green Hills produces

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs tha ...

s for the programming languages C,

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

, Fortran, and

Ada Ada may refer to: Places Africa * Ada Foah, a town in Ghana * Ada (Ghana parliament constituency) * Ada, Osun, a town in Nigeria Asia * Ada, Urmia, a village in West Azerbaijan Province, Iran * Ada, Karaman, a village in Karaman Province, T ...

. They are

cross-platform In computing, cross-platform software (also called multi-platform software, platform-agnostic software, or platform-independent software) is computer software that is designed to work in several computing platforms. Some cross-platform software ...

, for 32- and

64-bit In computer architecture, 64-bit integers, memory addresses, or other data units are those that are 64 bits wide. Also, 64-bit CPUs and ALUs are those that are based on processor registers, address buses, or data buses of that size. A ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

s, including

RISC-V RISC-V (pronounced "risk-five" where five refers to the number of generations of RISC architecture that were developed at the University of California, Berkeley since 1981) is an open standard instruction set architecture (ISA) based on est ...

ARM In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between th ...

Blackfin The Blackfin is a family of 16-/32-bit microprocessors developed, manufactured and marketed by Analog Devices. The processors have built-in, fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP) functionality supplied by 16-bit multiply–accumulates ( ...

ColdFire The NXP ColdFire is a microprocessor that derives from the Motorola 68000 family architecture, manufactured for embedded systems development by NXP Semiconductors. It was formerly manufactured by Freescale Semiconductor (formerly the semiconductor ...

, MIPS,

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple– IBM– ...

SuperH SuperH (or SH) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems. At the ...

, StarCore,

x86 x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and its 8088 variant. The 8086 was intr ...

V850 V850 is a 32-bit RISC CPU architecture produced by Renesas Electronics for embedded microcontrollers. It was designed by NEC as a replacement for their earlier NEC V60 family, and was introduced shortly before NEC sold their designs to Renesas ...

, and

XScale XScale is a microarchitecture for central processing units initially designed by Intel implementing the ARM architecture (version 5) instruction set. XScale comprises several distinct families: IXP, IXC, IOP, PXA and CE (see more below), with some ...

."Green Hills Optimizing Compilers"
Green Hills Software.

Integrated development environments

MULTI is an

(IDE) for the programming languages C,

, Embedded C++ (EC++), and

, aimed at embedded engineers. TimeMachine is a set of tools for optimizing and debugging C and C++ software. TimeMachine (introduced 2003) supports reverse debugging, a feature that later also became available in the free

GNU Debugger The GNU Debugger (GDB) is a portable debugger that runs on many Unix-like systems and works for many programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, Free Pascal, Fortran, Go, and partially others. History GDB was first written ...

(GDB) 7.0 (2009).

References

{{Microkernel Software companies based in California Computer companies established in 1982 1982 establishments in California Companies based in Santa Barbara County, California Microkernels Software companies of the United States