Why Wind River Linux

Wind River® Linux enables you to develop, deploy, and operate robust, reliable, and secure embedded solutions running on a purpose-built Linux operating system.

Avoid the risk and effort associated with roll-your-own (RYO) or unsupported silicon vendor Linux. Rely on Wind River to keep your code base up to date, track and fix defects, apply security patches, avoid technical debt, and customize your purpose-built Linux to adhere to strict market specifications and certifications. Wind River can also facilitate your IP and export compliance and significantly reduce your operational costs.

Wind River Linux Overview

Purpose Built, Community-Based Linux with Long Term Commercial Support

Wind River Linux customizes the Linux OS for the specific requirements of your application. It includes an integrated artifact repository that is accessible to development and deployment teams alike, simplifying sharing and collaboration across the organization.

Wind River is a founding member, advisory board member, and the largest commercial software contributor to the Yocto Project, collectively investing more than 8,000 commits and 2.5M lines of code changes over the past four years. Wind River actively upstreams and contributes fixes and enhancements back into the project while building Yocto Project support into the next generation of the Wind River platform.

Long Term Support

  • Maintenance that includes CVE monitoring and fixes
  • Daily testing and hardening to shrink the threat landscape
  • Support for a minimum of 10+ years for every Long Term Support (LTS) release
  • A variety of board support packages (BSPs) for a wide range of x86 and Arm hardware
  • An easily repeatable build process that is simplified with the Build System
  • Tracking of customizations to ensure transfer of knowledge even if teams change
  • Compliance where it counts – in the bill of materials (BOM), and in accordance with export regulations around the globe

Multiple Paths for Development

Wind River offers the greatest flexibility by providing commercial releases in two delivery models: in source code as Long Term Support (LTS) and pre-built binaries as Wind River Linux Distro.

Freely Available Commercial

Frequency

BASE release in sync with Yocto Project

LTS (Long Term Support) release, annual

Lifecycle

6–24 months, depending on the community

10+ years

Support

Community mailing lists

Standard, under Software License Agreement (SLA)


Additional options available

Maintenance

Community

Commercial, with predictable cadence

Distro (binary)

Download from the Wind River website; registration required

Available in sync with corresponding LTS release

Benefits include:

  • Periodic new releases from both the community LTS kernel and Yocto Project LTS
  • BSP support based on vendor software development kit (SDK) updates
  • Support for real-time kernel when needed
  • Charge per project, with no additional fees regardless of how many devices are deployed over the life of the project (unlike some Linux distributions that charge for each deployed device)

Wind River Linux Customer Success Stories

See how our customers are finding success with Wind River Linux and our award-winning support services.

Resources