Wind River's VxWorks is the world's leading commercial real-time operating system (RTOS) and has been serving the needs of embedded systems of all shapes and sizes for more than 25 years. VxWorks maintains this leadership because it is
- Proven: VxWorks has been used in more than 500 million deployed devices, from small consumer products to commercial airliners. The systems that VxWorks gets built into require complete reliability, and the consequences for failure are expensive or, worse, life threatening. Why take chances with such a critical piece of your system?
- Optimized: VxWorks has been optimized for performance, determinism, and code footprint on each processor platform it runs on. VxWorks is also optimized for specialized hardware support for such features as network acceleration and graphics. Why waste processing power on nonoptimized solutions?
- Innovative: VxWorks is leading the market in RTOS innovation. These innovations, such as multicore and multi-OS support, provide our customers with the leading-edge solutions they require to stay competitive. Why go with an RTOS that doesn’t provide the solutions you need to take advantage of the latest technology?
Core Areas of Innovation
VxWorks strives to innovate in key requirement areas for embedded systems. By their very nature, embedded systems are constrained by memory, performance, and power consumption. Application requirements continuously grow to satisfy new safety and security standards and customer value criteria such as rich user interfaces and connectivity. Wind River continues to innovate in the following areas:
- Multicore/multi-OS: VxWorks has been designed to be used in various multicore configurations as a single operating system in symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) and asymmetrical (AMP) modes or as a guest OS on top of Wind River Hypervisor.
- Security and safety: VxWorks innovations in safe and secure systems include a certifiable OS for very stringent safety standards such as FAA/RTCA DO-178B Level A, IEC 61508, and ARINC 653. VxWorks also provides a multiple levels of security (MLS), high robustness security RTOS for the demanding requirements of the Common Criteria and National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP).
- Connectivity: VxWorks has connectivity solutions for every facet of embedded systems communications, from device to device via USB and core to core in an AMP multicore system with MIPC to our industry-leading advanced networking.
- Graphics: VxWorks and Wind River Media Library form a robust platform for embedded graphics solutions. With Wind River Tilcon Graphics Suite, developers have a complete graphical user interface (GUI) development system for next-generation devices.
VxWorks Core Strengths
Wind River takes pride in the core strengths of VxWorks that have resulted in it being the proven leader in embedded operating systems. VxWorks continues to provide improvements in each of the following core strength areas of VxWorks:
- Footprint: In memory-constrained devices, memory footprint is a key concern. VxWorks has a completely configurable and tunable memory footprint. You control how much of the operating system you need.
- Real-time performance: VxWorks is a hard real-time operating system capable of dealing with most demanding timing constraints. VxWorks is also a high-performance OS tuned for both determinism and responsiveness.
- Reliability: VxWorks is a high-reliability OS. In fact, the Wind River VxWorks DO-178B, ARINC 653, and IEC 61508 platforms provide certification evidence required by these strict standards. Even for non-safety-critical systems, VxWorks is counted on to run forever, error free.
- Scalability: VxWorks is useful in very small-scale devices and used in large-scale networking systems. VxWorks is scalable in terms of memory footprint and also functionality; our customers can tune it to exactly what they need for their products.
