Wind River Systems, Inc. has been selected by Honeywell Aerospace to support the development of NASA's New Millennium Program Space Technology 8 (ST8) Dependable Multiprocessor. The contract marks the first time a Linux platform has been selected by Honeywell for a space mission.

Wind River and PrismTech announced a jointly developed "Spectra SDR" software-defined radio (SDR) middleware platform for both military and public sectors, compatible with Wind River's Linux and VxWorks distributions. Meanwhile, Wind River launched a blog feature, starting with President Ken Klein explaining how Wind River is a "firewalled subsidiary" of Intel, committed to independence.

Among the most widely deployed embedded operating systems on the planet is Wind River's VxWorks real-time OS. This week, Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) Wind River division is updating VxWorks to version 6.8, providing new multi-core and 4G wireless capabilities.

Thanks to a new joint effort between Intel and Wind River, you may soon be running Linux in your car. The effort will run under the auspices of the Intel led Moblin.org effort and will deal specifically with the in-vehicle infotainment marketplace. The idea is to create a Linux based Open Infotainment Platform that will run on Intel's Atom processor.

Intel's Wind River subsidiary is now the leader in embedded Linux, at least when it comes to revenues, according to the market analysis by VDC Research. Wind River, which was acquired in June by Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) for $884 million, has more than 30 percent of the total market revenue for embedded Linux, VDC found. Rival MontaVista Linux sees another story.

One story not told often enough involves Linux’ growing domination of the embedded market. In this space Linux usually stacks up against older Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS). The decision by Wind River, the largest RTOS vendor, to migrate toward Linux was a turning point.

With Red Hat, Novell - and now Intel, thanks to its $884m acquisition of Wind River - all crowding into the real-time Linux space, Concurrent has to keep on its toes and keep its RedHawk Linux, well, current. With RedHawk Linux 5.4, announced Tuesday, Concurrent is slipping into Linux 2.6.31 and offering full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 4.

Embedded specialist Wind River strives to win mobile network users with hardware compliance and its own Android branding.

Intel's acquisition of Wind River on Thursday is a strong push by the chip maker to extend Linux support across devices that use its processors, analysts said.