Green Hills Software

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Green Hills Software Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1982
Headquarters	Santa Barbara, California
Key people	Dan O'Dowd, founder and president
Website	www.ghs.com

Green Hills Software is a privately owned company that builds operating systems and development tools for embedded systems. The company was founded in 1982 by Dan O'Dowd and Carl Rosenberg. They are headquartered in Santa Barbara, California.^[1]

Products

Real-time operating systems (RTOS)

• INTEGRITY is a highly secure POSIX-certified^[2] royalty-free^[3] real-time operating system intended for use in embedded systems requiring reliability, security and fault tolerance.^[4] The separation kernel component has received the NSA's EAL6+ High Robustness security certification;^[5] as of mid-2009, it is the only operating system in the world to have done so.
• INTEGRITY-178B is an ARINC-653-1–compliant real-time operating system for applications containing multiple programs with different levels of safety criticality, all executing on a single processor.^[6]
• velOSity is a royalty-free real-time operating system for processors without a full memory management unit.^[7]
• µ-velOSity is a real-time microkernel for resource-constrained devices.^[8]

Compilers

Green Hills produces optimizing compilers for C, C++, Fortran, and Ada. The compilers target a variety of 32- and 64-bit platforms, including ARC, ARM, Blackfin, ColdFire, MIPS, PowerPC, SuperH, StarCore, x86, V850, and XScale.^[9]

The Green Hills C compilers support ANSI C (ANSI X3.159-1989) and C99, and provide several common extensions and dialects, including MISRA C diagnostics, K&R C (advertised as compatible with Bell Labs' original Portable C Compiler^[10]), and many GNU C extensions.

Integrated development environment (IDE)

• MULTI is an IDE for C, C++, EC++, and Ada. Aimed at embedded engineers, it is tightly coupled with Green Hills' compilers and hardware debug probes. It includes an integrated CVS browser, a diff viewer, code completion, graphical class hierarchy generators, run-time error checking, and scriptable breakpoints.^[11]
• TimeMachine^[12] is a set of tools for optimizing and debugging C and C++ software. TimeMachine records every instruction executed on a CPU, archives the instructions, and allows the developer to review the executed instructions. The TimeMachine debugger uses the recorded instructions to reconstruct the system's state backwards in time; hence the name of the product.^[13] On embedded processors, TimeMachine is implemented using a trace port on the CPU.^[14] Trace ports are built directly on the processor die and thus have virtually no performance penalties, allowing TimeMachine to collect debug information at full speed.

TimeMachine can be used for analyzing race conditions and other Heisenbugs. The ability to replay instruction sequences at a later time may be used by embedded engineers who cannot use breakpoints because halting the program is impossible (for example, when debugging the flight controller on an aircraft).^[15]

• TraceEdge is a trace collector that allows the programmer to use TimeMachine on microprocessors without a built-in trace port.^[16]

Processor probes and hardware debug devices

• The Green Hills Probe is a hardware debug probe for load, control, debug, and test on a target system without the need for prior board initialization. Through a JTAG or BDM test port, the probe can debug and control the core state (such as CPU internal registers) as well as the system state (external RAM and flash memory).^[17]
• The SuperTrace Probe adds a trace collection system that non-intrusively captures up to one gigabyte of trace data in real time at processor speeds up to 1.2 GHz.^[18]
• The Slingshot debug probe has a USB interface.^[19]

Competitors

Green Hills' INTEGRITY operating system competes with other real-time operating systems, including Wind River Systems' VxWorks, QNX Inc.'s Neutrino, LynuxWorks' LynxOS, Mentor Graphics' Nucleus RTOS, the Japanese standard ITRON, Micrium's µC/OS-II, Microware's OS-9, ENEA AB's OSE and, to some extent, Linux offered by distributors such as Timesys, Montavista, FSMLabs and Sysgo.

Windows and Linux compete with INTEGRITY PC for secure graphical user interface applications.

Green Hills' μ-velOSity competes directly with Express Logic's ThreadX.

Notes and references

External links

• Green Hills Software homepage
• Profile at biz.yahoo.com
• Article on SD Times award at earthtimes.org
• Article at EDN