Wind River Systems, Inc., also known as Wind River (trademarked as Wndrvr), is an

Alameda, California Alameda ( ; ; Spanish for "Avenue (landscape), tree-lined path") is a city in Alameda County, California, United States, located in the East Bay (San Francisco Bay Area), East Bay region of the Bay Area. The city is built on an informal archipe ...

–based company, subsidiary of Aptiv PLC. The company develops

embedded system An embedded system is a specialized 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 e ...

and cloud software consisting of real-time operating systems software, industry-specific software, simulation technology, development tools and

middleware Middleware is a type of computer software program that provides services to software applications beyond those available from the operating system. It can be described as "software glue". Middleware makes it easier for software developers to imple ...

History

Wind River Systems was formed by a partnership of Jerry Fiddler and Dave Wilner. Until 1981, Fiddler had worked at Berkeley Lab writing software for

control system A control system manages, commands, directs, or regulates the behavior of other devices or systems using control loops. It can range from a single home heating controller using a thermostat controlling a domestic boiler to large industrial ...

s, and wanted to pursue a career in computer generated music, which he funded through a consultancy business focused on

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

s. His early clients included the

National Football League The National Football League (NFL) is a Professional gridiron football, professional American football league in the United States. Composed of 32 teams, it is divided equally between the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National ...

and film director

Francis Ford Coppola Francis Ford Coppola ( ; born April 7, 1939) is an American filmmaker. He is considered one of the leading figures of the New Hollywood and one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. List of awards and nominations received by Francis Ford Coppo ...

, for whom he designed a unique film editing system. Wilner, a former colleague at Berkeley Lab, joined Fiddler to form Wind River Systems in 1983. In 2009, Wind River was acquired by

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

. In 2018, Intel spun out its Wind River division, which was then acquired by

TPG Capital TPG Inc., previously known as Texas Pacific Group and TPG Capital, is an American private equity firm based in Fort Worth, Texas. TPG manages investment funds in growth capital, venture capital, public equity, and debt investments. The firm in ...

. On January 11, 2022, Wind River announced that it was acquired by Aptiv, an auto parts company, for $4.3 billion in cash. The company's key milestones include:
/ref> * 1983: Wind River is incorporated in 1983 with each partner contributing $3,000 and a desk to the business. The company was named for Wind River (Wyoming), Wind River, Wyoming, where Fiddler had vacationed that year * 1987: Wind River introduces

VxWorks VxWorks is a real-time operating system (or RTOS) developed as proprietary software by Wind River Systems, a subsidiary of Aptiv. First released in 1987, VxWorks is designed for use in embedded systems requiring real-time, Deterministic system, ...

, a leading real-time operating system for embedded devices. * 1995: VxWorks launches into space on the NASA Clementine moon probe. Also, the Tornado integrated development environment is launched and wins EDN's Embedded Development Software Innovation of the Year award as the first graphically oriented development environment for embedded * 1997: VxWorks, the real-time operating system for NASA's Mars Pathfinder mission, lands on Mars * 1999: Acquisition of one of their major competitors, Integrated Systems Inc., makers of pSOS. Wind River has since discontinued the pSOS product line and has recommended existing pSOS customers move to VxWorks. * 2001: Wind River Systems acquired Belgian software company Eonic Systems, the developer of Virtuoso RTOS for DSPs. In November 2015, Wind River Systems renamed the operating system to Rocket, made it open-source and royalty-free. In 2016, Rocket was incorporated into Zephyr RTOS hosted by

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

. * 2004: Wind River officially enters the embedded Linux market, with a Carrier Grade Linux platform targeting the networking & communications infrastructure industry. Also, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, powered by VxWorks,Insid
NASA's Curiosity
It's an Apple Airport Extreme… with wheels, ExtremeTech land on Mars. Wind River helped in manufacturing the IntelliStar for

The Weather Channel The Weather Channel (TWC) is an American pay television television channel, channel owned by Weather Group, LLC, a subsidiary of Allen Media Group. The channel's headquarters are located in Atlanta, Georgia. Launched on May 2, 1982, the channel ...

. The IntelliStar is used at Cable Headends to insert Local Weather into The Weather Channel's national programming. * 2007: Wind River joins Google's

Open Handset Alliance The Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is a consortium led by Google that develops the Android (operating system), Android mobile operating system. Its member firms included HTC, Sony, Dell, Intel, Motorola, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Samsung Electr ...

as an original Linux commercialization partner. * 2008: Wind River establishes the embedded Linux market share lead with greater than 30 percent of total market revenue, four years after entering the market. * 2009: Intel acquires Wind River for approximately $884 million and it becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel. Wind River launches a commercial Android software platform. Wind River becomes a founding member of the GENIVI Alliance, now called COVESA (Connected Vehicle Systems Alliance). * 2010: Wind River adds Simics, a full system simulator, to its product portfolio. VxWorks becomes the first RTOS to be certified under Wurldtech's Achilles certification program, a standard for industrial cyber security. Wind River partners with Intel and the Linux Foundation to create the Yocto Project, an open source collaboration project providing templates, tools and methods to help developers create embedded Linux-based systems. * 2012: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) successfully lands Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity, powered by Wind River technology. Wind River debuts software platform targeted at gateways and hubs for the

Internet of things Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The IoT encompasse ...

. * 2013: Wind River becomes part of Intel's Internet of Things Group (IOTG), but remains a wholly owned subsidiary. Barry Mainz assumes the position of President. * 2014: Wind River introduces its software for network functions virtualization (NFV) applications, as well as its next-generation VxWorks platform reinvented for the Internet of Things. * 2014: Wind River fined $750,000 by

Bureau of Industry and Security The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce that deals with issues involving national security and high technology. A principal goal for the bureau is helping stop the proliferation of weap ...

for exporting encryption technology to countries including Israel and South Korea. * 2015: the company was accused of repeated trademark and licensing violations of the Grsecurity project, which as response has restricted its code to commercial partners only. * 2016: Intel announced that it intended to fully integrate Wind River into one of its divisions (thus ending Wind River's status as a wholly owned subsidiary,) although the scheduled completion date of this action has not been made public. Barry Mainz left the company to become president and CEO of MobileIron and Jim Douglas assumes the position of President. * 2018: Intel divested Wind River Systems to alternative asset fund manager TPG under undisclosed terms. *2018: Ford selects Wind River Over-the-Air Update Technology. *2018: NASA's

InSight Insight is the understanding of a specific causality, cause and effect within a particular context. The term insight can have several related meanings: *a piece of information *the act or result of understanding the inner nature of things or of se ...

lands on Mars with VxWorks operating system. *2019: Wind River became the first OpenChain 2.0 conformant organization. *2020: Kevin Dallas named as CEO and member of the board of directors. *2020:

Verizon Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

uses Wind River's software infrastructure for its deployment of virtualized 5G RAN. *2020: Wind River becomes first and only to achieve The Open Group FACE Conformance for Linux. *2021: Perseverance Mars becomes fourth Mars rover running VxWorks operating system. *2021:

Vodafone Vodafone Group Public Limited Company () is a British Multinational company, multinational telecommunications company. Its registered office and global headquarters are in Newbury, Berkshire, England. It predominantly operates Service (economic ...

selects Wind River as a partner to build Europe's first commercial open RAN network. *2022: Wind River was acquired by Aptiv from TPG Capital for $4.3 billion in cash. *2024: Wind River Chief Product Officer Avijit Sinha named as president.

Products

Among the company's products are the

, the Wind River Linux operating system, and the

Eclipse An eclipse is an astronomical event which occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three ...

-based Wind River Workbench IDE. VxWorks began as an add-on to the VRTX operating system in the early 1980s. Wind River Workbench superseded the previous ''Tornado'' environment.Company Overview o
Wind River Systems
Inc., Bloomberg Businessweek

VxWorks

VxWorks is the original flagship product of Wind River. It is a real-time operating system (

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

) intended for embedded and critical infrastructure devices and systems. It supports multicore processors, 32-bit and 64-bit, for several architectures including ARM,

, and Power and has over one hundred board support packages ( BSPs) for different hardware systems. VxWorks is a real time and deterministic operating system.

Wind River Linux

Wind River's Linux product is source code and a build system that generate runtime images suitable for embedded devices. Historically, Wind River Linux has supported a variety of architectures, including ARM, 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 Inc., App ...

, IA32 and SPARC. The current release of Wind River Linux supports a variety of ARM, IA32, and

IA64 IA-64 (Intel Itanium architecture) is the instruction set architecture (ISA) of the discontinued Itanium family of 64-bit Intel microprocessors. The basic ISA specification originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was subsequently implemented b ...

platforms with both standard and realtime ( PREEMPT RT) kernels. Wind River charges a subscription to provide commercial bug and CVE fixes for their Linux products. Pricing is project-based, with a flat fee for each solution built on top of Wind River Linux. There is no per-device subscription or royalty. The key capabilities for Wind River Linux are 10 year commercial support life, complete customization including kernel changes, reproducible customizations, wide range of hardware support through Board Support Packages (BSP) that are ported, maintained, and tested by Wind River.

Early history

In 2004, Wind River announced a partnership with

Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. (formerly Red Hat Software, Inc.) is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North ...

to create a new

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

-based distribution for embedded devices. Wind River has since ended its partnership with Red Hat and now ships its own Linux distribution optimized for embedded Linux development. Wind River released the first version of its embedded Linux distribution, Platform for Network Equipment - Linux Edition (PNE-LE) 1.0 in 2005. It was registered against the Carrier Grade Linux 2.0 specification and supported IA32 and PPC architectures. They added other platforms in subsequent releases, General Purpose Platform - Linux Edition (GPP-LE) and Platform for Consumer Devices - Linux Edition PCD-LE) starting in version 1.4. In 2013 Wind River announced Wind River Linux 6.0.Wind River Linux 6
, Yocto Project webpage Wind River Systems acquired FSMLabs embedded technology in February 2007 and made a version available as Wind River Real-Time Core for Wind River Linux. As of August 2011, Wind River has discontinued the Wind River Real-Time Core product line, effectively ending commercial support for the RTLinux product. On August 7, 2007, Palm Inc. announced it would use Wind River Systems Linux for its (later aborted) Palm Foleo. In 2008, Wind River announced cooperation with

BMW Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, trading as BMW Group (commonly abbreviated to BMW (), sometimes anglicised as Bavarian Motor Works), is a German multinational manufacturer of vehicles and motorcycles headquartered in Munich, Bavaria, Germany. Th ...

and

Magneti Marelli Marelli Europe S.p.A. (formerly Magneti Marelli S.p.A.) is a European subsidiary of Marelli Holdings which develops and manufactures components for the automotive industry. The firm is headquartered in Corbetta, Italy, and includes 86 manufac ...

for development of a

-based

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

platform to control in-car electronics, which was extended in the GENIVI Alliance in 2009.

Yocto Project

In 2012, Wind River introduced a version of Linux that was developed from the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure and achieved Yocto project compatible registration. All subsequent releases of Wind River Linux are based on the Yocto Project.

Wind River Linux release history

Wind River has historically released a new Wind River Linux LTS (Long Term Support) about every year that are generally based on the then current Linux Kernel LTS release and the latest Yocto Project release.

Wind River Linux Distro

In 2022, Wind River launched a new product, Wind River Linux Distro, that is a binary Linux distribution based on the Wind River Linux source-based product. The Distro is intended for embedded solution developers that need a commercially supported Linux for their project, but do not need the extensive customization capabilities of the Yocto Project-based Wind River Linux. The key features are quick time to value, customization via tools such as the Linux Assembly Tool & an RPM package feed, and updates via OSTree. Developers can download a free version of the Wind River Linux Distro by going t
https://www.windriver.com/products/linux/download
A number of hardware platforms are enabled by the Distro. Commercial support is currently available for a subset of the enabled platforms.

Simics

Simics is a full-system simulator used by software developers to simulate the hardware of complex electronic systems.

Wind River Studio

Wind River Studio is a cloud-native platform for the deployment and servicing of mission-critical intelligent edge systems.

Acquisitions

*1991: Assets of ITRA (

Vannes Vannes (; , , ) is a Communes of France, commune in the Departments of France, French department of Morbihan, Brittany (administrative region), Brittany, northwestern mainland France. It was founded over 2,000 years ago. History Celtic ...

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

) *1997: DSP Foundry (WiSP RTOS for Motorola DSP563xx family) *1999: Integrated Systems Inc. ( pSOS+) *2000: Merge staff of Dragonfly Software Consulting *2000: Embedded Support Tools Corp. (ESTC) *2000: ICEsoft (

Bergen Bergen (, ) is a city and municipalities of Norway, municipality in Vestland county on the Western Norway, west coast of Norway. Bergen is the list of towns and cities in Norway, second-largest city in Norway after the capital Oslo. By May 20 ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

) *2000: AudeSi Technologies Inc. (

Calgary Calgary () is a major city in the Canadian province of Alberta. As of 2021, the city proper had a population of 1,306,784 and a metropolitan population of 1,481,806 making it the third-largest city and fifth-largest metropolitan area in C ...

Alberta Alberta is a Provinces and territories of Canada, province in Canada. It is a part of Western Canada and is one of the three Canadian Prairies, prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to its west, Saskatchewan to its east, t ...

, Canada) *2001: Eonic Systems (Virtuoso RTOS) *2001: Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDI) *2005: ScopeTools business unit from Real-Time Innovations *2006: Interpeak AB (

Stockholm Stockholm (; ) is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in Sweden by population, most populous city of Sweden, as well as the List of urban areas in the Nordic countries, largest urban area in the Nordic countries. Approximately ...

Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north, and Finland to the east. At , Sweden is the largest Nordic count ...

) *2007: Assets of FSMLabs (

Socorro, New Mexico Socorro (, ''Help:Pronunciation respelling key, sə-KOR-oh'') is a city in Socorro County, New Mexico, Socorro County in the U.S. state of New Mexico. It is in the Middle Rio Grande Valley AVA, Rio Grande Valley at an elevation of . At the 2020 ...

United States The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 U.S. state, states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 ...

) *2008: MIZI (

Seoul Seoul, officially Seoul Special Metropolitan City, is the capital city, capital and largest city of South Korea. The broader Seoul Metropolitan Area, encompassing Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Incheon, emerged as the world's List of cities b ...

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

) *2009: Tilcon Software Limited (

Ottawa Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It is located in the southern Ontario, southern portion of the province of Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the cor ...

Ontario Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...

, Canada) *2010: Virtutech (

) *2011: Switch++ ( Santa Clara,

) *2016 Arynga *2020 Star Labs

References

External links

Wind River Systems company website
{{Authority control 1981 establishments in California 2009 mergers and acquisitions 2022 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1981 Companies based in Alameda, California Companies based in Berkeley, California Intel acquisitions Linux companies Software companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area Software companies established in 1981 Software companies of the United States