Written by George Dunlap, Xen Project Advisory Board Chair
Tailored versions of Xen Hypervisor have been used in mission-critical systems for years, but this was never the case for Xen’s mainline. Starting 2019, a Xen Project Functional Safety Special Interest Group was formed to identify and eliminate obstacles to safety-certify Xen.
Safety certification is one of the essential requirements for software to be used in highly regulated industries. Besides technical and compliance issues (such as ISO 26262 vs IEC 61508) transitioning an existing project to become more easily safety certifiable requires significant changes to development practices within an open source project.
At the upcoming ELISA Workshop on May 18-20, Artem Mygaiev, Director, Technology Solutions, EPAM Systems and Stefano Stabellini, Principal Engineer, Xilinx, will lay out some challenges of making safety certification achievable in open source. The talk, scheduled for May 18 at 7:30 am PDT, will primarily focus on the necessary processes, tooling changes, and community challenges that can prevent progress. Additionally, the talk will offer an in-depth review of how Xen Project is approaching this challenging goal and try to derive lessons for other projects and contributors.
Artem Mygaiev, EPAM Systems 
Stefano Stabellini, Xilinx
This talk will provide real-life perspectives from open source community members on achieving safety certification. Audiences will have a clear understanding of what obstacles the group faced and how they are overcoming challenges, as well as how to set realistic expectations when embarking on this task. Add this talk to your schedule here: https://sched.co/j3SO.
The ELISA Workshop is free and open to the public. Check out the schedule and register today: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/elisa-workshop/.