OSADL Project: Safety Critical Linux

Safety Critical Linux - Working Group Proposal by Nicholas Mc Guire

Related Technologies

Assessment and Validation leading to a full Certification of a safety critical system are conducted at the system level and generally not on the component level (though there are works of interest targeting modular safety cases for modular systems - strongly driven by IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics)). The system level safety again is based on components with safety responsibility along with non-safety critical components. This possibility of separation or categrorisation of components opens options based on encapsulation, virtualization and monitoring.

In the past year there has been strong public attention on the topic of virtualization in the server and even desk-top market. These activities in part might be of relevance for the construction of safety critical system - though most of these technologies lack the notion of real-time (Linux-2.6.20++,lguest,KVM,XEN,VmWare,etc.) at a level that would be considered sufficient for a large part of safety critical systems.

• real-time Technologies
• Virtualization