Embedded Systems Design Europe - June/July 2008 - (Page 12)

news Project to provide coverage analysis tool AdaCore, Open Wide, ENST and LIP6 with ﬁnancial support from French public funds, is setting up ‘Project Coverage’, an open source project to produce a Free Software coverage analysis toolset together with artifacts that allow the tools to be used by developers of safety-critical and mission-critical projects, including systems that need to be certiﬁed under safety standards such as DO-178B. Project Coverage, which was detailed at the Safety-Critical Systems Club event in London, is partially funded by Paris, the Ile-de-France region and the French ministry of the industry, under the auspices of the Free & Open Source Software group headed by Roberto Di Cosmo in System@tic, the R&D competitive cluster located in Paris and its surroundings. Project Coverage is based on the premise that code coverage can greatly beneﬁt from recent advances in hardware virtualisation and emulation technologies. “By virtualising the target hardware, Project Coverage tools can execute the target binary code unmodiﬁed on a host computer, such as a GNU Linux or Windows machine, and collect binary branch information,” said Olivier Hainque, technical lead of Project Coverage at AdaCore (New York, NY). “The collected information is then analysed off-line and mapped back to the original sources thanks to the debugging information contained in the executable.” “Our virtualisation technology is based on QEMU. We are extending it, ﬁrst to output execution traces, including binary branch coverage information, and second to make it usable in industrial contexts typically found in the avionics domain,” added Hainque. Beyond the production of useful tools and certiﬁcation material for industrial users, an important goal of the project is to raise awareness and interest about safety-critical and certiﬁcation issues in the Free Software/Open Source community. “It’s all about cross-fertilisation between the DO-178B and Free Software/ Open Source communities,” said Cyrille Comar, the AdaCore representative on the DO-178C committee. “The DO178B community, with its approach anchored in requirements-based testing, has shown us that the source isn’t everything in safety-critical systems, while the Open Source community has shown us that being open and having high-quality and widely available tools is essential to extend the beneﬁt of state-of-the-art technologies from niche markets to a wider audience of software developers.” Franco Gasperoni, AdaCore’s managing director said, “Project Coverage tools will be easy to use and deploy since they run on the host computer. They will be independent of the programming language and will work for Ada, C, and C++. The tools are also designed to be non-intrusive and work directly with the ﬁnal executable. No specialised hardware will be required to extract coverage information.” Project Coverage tools will be freely available, and industrial users will have the option to purchase support together with DO-178B qualiﬁcation material. Open Wide who will provide an avionics test bed and study the impact of MIL-STD-1553, ARINC 629, and similar avionics standards for Project Coverage while ENST and LIP6 are tasked with generalising the approach to distributed systems and languages running on a virtual machine. “Being strongly rooted in Free Software and having many customers in the Avionics and DO-178B domain, AdaCore was instrumental in getting this project off the ground,” said Roberto Di Cosmo, President of the Free and Open Source Software group of System@tic, the R&D competitive cluster out of which Project Coverage has grown. Microsoft details latest Windows embedded update Microsoft Corp. has provided details of Windows Embedded Standard 2009 Community Technology Preview (CTP) and said the product will be available to customers in the fourth quarter of 2008. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 is designed for OEMs wanting to build devices that seamlessly connect into the existing enterprise infrastructure. It includes Microsoft Silverlight, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) 6.1, and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. Support for Silverlight provides a 12 cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity and stunning user interfaces. RDP 6.1 and Network Access Protection (NAP) enable devices to seamlessly connect to Windows Vista-based PCs and take advantage of new features in Windows Server 2008 including the latest security and management technology. Windows Embedded Standard 2009 will be useful for managed and secure thin clients, sophisticated point of service and kiosk devices and smart networked multifunction printers that are easy to manage and connect with enterprise infrastructure. It also includes componentized drivers for Intel Corp. latest x86 processor architectures including the Atom processor. Any OEM that purchases a Windows XP Embedded Toolkit between June and September 2008 will be eligible to request a Windows Embedded Standard 2009 replacement toolkit. JUNE – JULY 2008 | embedded systems design europe | www.embedded.com/europe http://www.embedded.com/europe

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Embedded Systems Design Europe - June/July 2008

Embedded Systems Design Europe - June 2008 Contents Work in Progress to Define Compact PCI Plus Power.org Demonstrates New Tools Project Supports Multi-core System Programming Altium Links Electronic to Mechanical Design PLDs Look to Cut Power Budget and Costs Project to Provide Coverage Analysis Tool Microsoft Details Windows Embedded Update Cover Feature: Leveraging Virtual Hardware Platforms for Software Allocating Memory in MATLAB-to-C Code MDD & IDEs: Making the Twain Meet in Embedded System Designs Debugging Mixed Signal Designs for Infrequent & Random Events Why Open Source is the Natural Choice for High-security Systems Bringing the Benefits of Low Power CPUs to Modular Design New Products Advertising Contacts

Embedded Systems Design Europe - June/July 2008

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