ELISA Project Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend.
Title: Xen Safety Certification: progress so far and plans for the future (hosted by ELISA Aerospace Working Group)
Date: Wednesday, September 6, 7:00-8:00 am PDT/10:00-11:00 pm EDT / 16:00-17:00 CEST / 14:00-15:00 UTC
Speaker: Stefano Stabellini, Fellow at AMD, Xen Hypervisor & Linux Kernel Maintainer
How to Attend: Register in advance to attend for free. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. And don’t forget to add the event to your calendar from the confirmation email.
Abstract:
Xen Project is a static partitioning hypervisor for embedded, from aerospace to industrial and automotive. Xen enforces strong isolation between domains so that one cannot affect the execution of another. Features such as cache coloring reduce interference and improve interrupt latency and determinism. A real-time workload can run alongside a more complex guest. But can it be used in safety-critical environments?
The Xen hypervisor has a microkernel design: services and tools are non-essential and run in unprivileged VMs, while the core is less than 50K LOC. This architecture lends itself well to safety-critical applications as only the hypervisor core is critical and needs to go through the certification process.
This presentation will describe the activities of the Xen FuSa SIG (Special Interest Group) to make Xen easier to safety-certify. It will highlight the most significant improvements introduced in the last 12 months to align Xen with safety standards such as DO-178C and ISO 26262. It will go into detail on MISRA C compliance, its latest status, and the next steps to close all the outstanding MISRA C gaps. It will discuss the role of Gitlab-CI and how to keep the Xen codebase MISRA C compliant without major efforts.
The Xen community has a clear path ahead to achieve the safety certification of the hypervisor. This talk will discuss it focusing on the most impactful changes to the Xen codebase and Xen community processes.
For all upcoming ELISA Working Group meetings and public seminars please go to https://lists.elisa.tech/calendar.
