Motivation
These days, open source software can be found in almost every reasonably complex product running software. It runs in medical devices, robots, vehicles, and even outer space. In the underlying industry sectors, certification and safety integrity standards play an important role which at first glance seem at odds with the use of pre-existing open source software, not developed strictly in accordance with industry standards.
In this talk recent ELISA project deliverables in the field of elements, processes, and tools are highlighted. These include system theoretic process analysis, workload tracing, call-tree visualization on kernel level, and reproducible example use-cases from the field of medical devices and automotive. Their role in reducing the burden for companies to build and certify open source based safety-critical applications is shown.
Additionally, an overview of upcoming ELISA activities is provided and how cross project collaboration is established, as the ELISA work streams include interaction with e.g. the Zephyr, Xen, AGL, yocto, and SPDX community. A few statements on the overall challenges of safety-critical use cases using free open-source software will help to pick up the audience which is new to safety-critical or open-source software development.
Benefits to the Mobility and Open Source Ecosystem
As the programming performance of embedded devices increases more and more functions are centralized. Also, previously stand-alone decentralized system elements migrate into centralized single devices which comes with an increasing software complexity.
This demands to go new ways to either enhance the function set of commercial OS designed for safety, but not for complexity, or enhance free open source OS designed for complexity, but not for safety in first place.
The work of ELISA, as presented in this talk, aims to enable the usage of open source software in safety-critical applications. By doing so, the open approach and usage of generic tools and concept will enable others to build safer and more dependable products, no matter if they are based on Linux other open source OS or even commercial OS.
The focus on the open source nature will generate trust for users in the field of safety in the long term as already achieved by the trust of open source software for privacy and security reasons during the last decade.
Target Audience
The audience are embedded system developer and architects which must fulfil industrial standards driven by certification but want to use free pre-existing open source software. As the talk is submitted for the automotive track, it will focus on mobility use cases, but also questions from other industries like aerospace, industrial or medical are welcome
It can also enable quality assurance and safety engineers to get a better understanding what is possible with open source software and especially Linux in the use for dependable systems.