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Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I did not know Wind River was still around, never mind producing a Linux Distro.

Sigh, we buy their compilers for our clients on a monthly basis because the PPC and ARM support in GCC and Clang is still quite primitive.

The WR compiler generates code that is on average about 50% smaller and 30% faster last time we checked circa 2020, and it is ISO 26262 certified for a safety application.

Didn't Intel buy them at some point?

Intel bought them in 2009. Then, in 2018 they were sold to TPG. And in 2020, to Aptiv.

(From the "Our History" section of this page: https://www.windriver.com/company )

Aptiv PLC is the automotive tech company that grew out of the GM spin-off, Delphi Automotive Systems, btw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptiv

Delphi owning them makes way more sense than Intel ever did.

Wondered what happened there. I have an old boss who still works for them (managing support I believe). Nice lady.

Have you done benchmarks against other competitors? I ask because twenty years ago I used to work for Green Hills' compiler team, and we were very proud of our optimizer at the time (versus both gcc and wind river). That said, I worked on mips and various other chips, not ppc or arm.

Green Hills is a little bit out of our price point. Wind River compiler is very cheap by comparison (ie just a few $k)

The newer versions of the Wind River compiler is based on Clang under the hood. I wonder how the comparisons shake out vs with older versions which were more custom.

I worked on the same floor as the compiler guys and they were probably some of the best programmers in the company, them and the vxworks guys.

It takes a lot to maintain and certify a toolchain. Nevermind that the people working on it are smart people, there's a lot of process that goes into it that can only be implemented with the commercial backing of a big company behind it.

A lot of Juniper Routers these days are actually running Junos in a Virtual Machine. The base distribtuion the Hypervisor runs on? Wind River Linux.

https://community.juniper.net/discussion/srx1500-will-not-bo... [For example]

Cisco’s 64bit XR software also runs Wind River, but I can’t speak to whether it’s a hypervisor setup.

We had some routers from them that had general compute blades and those ran Wind River + QNX-based 32bit XR in a VM, but it’s pretty outdated at this point.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/routers/as...

Interesting not BSD anymore?

JunOS is still BSD, but it runs atop a Linux Hypervisor.

What’s the reasoning for the extra complexity and resource usage? Does it help stability or something?

I myself have had the same question and never got an answer. I _think_ it's so they only have to have one build of Junos and just have to make minor changes to the Hypervisor itself to support the hardware. But who knows? Juniper have really lost their way IMHO, hypervisors on hardware designed to route traffic at scale just seems like a reflection of that fact.

Yeah seems weird but I guess the hypervisor part isn’t so odd since Citrix does it for their netscalers. Although even load balancing is probably less critical than routing traffic. I am surprised either works well under virtualization.

It's just the control plan running under Hypervisor though. The forwarding hardware is still being programmed etc, so it doesn't impact performance in that regard. For things like BGP convergence etc they've introduced it so that BGP gets sharded so that it scales better.

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