The ELISA Project is looking for interested students to contribute to the activities to enable the use of the Linux kernel in safety-critical systems in the Google Summer of Code student mentorship program. The Google Summer of Code program is similar to a paid-internship, via Google and the Linux Foundation, that provides students funding, mentoring by experts, and resources. The Linux Foundation has participated in this summer program for several years as a mentor organization.
Launched last month, the ELISA Project’s mission is to define and maintain a common set of tools and processes that can help companies demonstrate that a Linux-based system meets the necessary safety requirements for certification.
This overall mission requires some work with profound expertise in functional safety. However, students do not need to have this expertise in functional safety to work the Google Summer of Code project proposals.
The students’ contributions are focused on software development projects related to the Linux kernel and dedicated tools that are used in the processes around the Linux kernel development. Students must have some solid programming experience with one of the programming languages in the various projects, i.e., C, python or OCaml.
The students’ contributions to kernel analysis and tools will generate valuable, diverse and objective insights to the kernel development, which will then serve as a general basis for functional safety software experts to put together the arguments for the intended safety case.
On the one hand, some project proposals are new software development projects that currently only exist as project ideas with first feasibility studies. In this case, the students are deeply involved in the initial project-forming design decisions through the discussions with their mentors and take care of all aspects of a typical software development project, e.g., feature definition, design, implementation, testing and quality assurance.
In other cases, project proposals are additions and extensions to pre-existing open-source software projects around the Linux kernel development and process analysis. In this case, the students need to understand the design of the existing projects and improve the projects’ design and functionality to be suitable for some investigation tasks in the ELISA Project.
Students will have the chance to participate in the newly formed group of collaborators in the technical workgroups of the ELISA Project and are mentored by the main developers of the pre-existing tools.
Selected successful Google Summer of Code students will have the chance to participate in the workshops planned in the ELISA Project and can present their work to an international audience on the satellite events to renowned Linux conferences.
Interested students can reach out to their potential mentors now to use the time to discuss and work out a technical solid and credible project proposal and project plan to implement the tasks at hand. The deadline for providing the final project proposals on the official Google Summer of Code Project page is on April 9, 2019.
For more information or to submit a project proposal, visit:
https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/gsoc/2019-gsoc-safety-critical-linux