maemalynn – Page 2

Apr 20

ELISA Welcomes 3 Mentees!

By maemalynn Blog, Mentorship, Working Group

The Linux Foundation has had a robust mentorship program for years that invests in new talent and diversity that helps the open source community – no matter what the focus or project – thrive as a whole. Since its formal launch in 2019, the LFX Mentorship has graduated more than 190 mentees and has hosted almost 100 mentorship programs.

This Spring, the ELISA Project is hosting two mentorships that will help developers gain real-world knowledge in a hands-on learning experience with Linux and open source. It also provides a more defined path for ELISA to connect with the next generation to inject more talent into their developer base.

The Spring Mentorship session, which kicked off in March, paired mentees with leaders from Codethink, the Linux Foundation and Mobileye. The ELISA Project is excited to welcome Irenge Jules Bashizi, Shefali Sharma and Wenhui Zhang as the newest mentees in the ELISA community. Please see below for more details about their mentorships and mentors. As they settle into their new roles, we hope to feature their mentorship journey in upcoming blog posts.

Mentorship: Analysis of eBPF (extended Berkley Packet Filter) Verifier

To make eBPF programs “safe”, the Linux kernel validates all eBPF code before loading. However, the current validator has many known limitations, leading to rejection of working programs.

Focus in this mentorship will be:

In-depth analysis and review of the eBPF validator, and its use to validate eBPF programs.
Code enhancements to the validator to improve usability.
Identify use cases for kernel profiling in safety critical applications.

Mentor: Elana Copperman, Chair of the Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems Working Group and System Safety Architect at Mobileye (part of Intel)

Elana provides support for designing safety features in Mobileye products, including system boot; drivers; and Linux infrastructure. Before working at Mobileye, she worked as a Security Architect for Cisco-Il (formerly NDS) and more recently as a security consultant for major European automotive concerns on behalf of various Israeli startups. Research interests focus on software engineering methodologies and security engineering.

In particular, focusing on expanding open source and Linux-based tools to support safety critical and life saving product development.

Mentee: Irenge Jules Bashizi

Jules is a Computer science student at University of Manchester. He is a certified Linux System administrator. Jules is interested in improving his skills in Kernel engineering by contributing to the Linux Kernel community by submitting patches. This internship offers him a unique opportunity tailored to improve and contribute. As a hobby, Jules enjoys jogging..

Mentee: Wenhui Zhang

Mentorship: Discovering Linux kernel subsystems used by OpenAPS

OpenAPS is an open source Artificial Pancreas System designed to automatically adjust an insulin pump’s insulin delivery to keep Blood Glucose in a safe range at all times. It is an open and transparent effort to make safe and effective basic Automatic Pancreas System technology widely available to anyone with compatible medical devices who is willing to build their own system.

What happens when an OpenAPS workload runs on Linux? What are the subsystems and modules that are in active use when OpenAPS is running? What are the interactions between OpenAPS and the kernel when a user checks how much insulin is left in the insulin pump?

The ELISA Medical Devices Working Group set out to answer these questions. Understanding the kernel footprint necessary to run a workload helps us focus on the subsystem and modules that make up the footprint for safety.

The mentee will:

Use Linux kernel tracing and strace tool to discover Linux kernel subsystems used by OpenAPS.
Find Linux system calls supported on various architectures.
Write a blog/whitepaper on the findings which will aid ELISA Medical Devices WG to focus on the subsystem and modules that make up the footprint for safety.

Shefali Sharma has started working on the project to advance the work Shuah and Milna have shared in their recent blog here.

Mentor: Milan Lakhani, Co-Chair of the Medical Devices Working Group and Systems and Software Engineer at Codethink

In open source, Milan’s contributions to Linux kernel are aimed at achieving ELISA project goals. Other than that, he has previously worked in the Trustable and community – mainly STPA analysis on design and writing requirements and tests and also some patches to help with making a webapp and porting.

There are a lot of aspects and opportunities to really learn through experience and take responsibility to make an impact on a highly approved, tested and growing Closed Loop Open-Source insulin delivery system that is really helping to reduce issues of people with type 1 diabetes. There should also be some variety in the tasks and the approach that the mentee can do. Milan is excited to share his skills and knowledge with STPA (our method of safety analysis for the system), the OpenAPS system and codebase (OpenAPS is the medical device itself) and Linux kernel.

Mentor: Shuah Khan, ELISA Project TSC Chair and Linux Foundation Fellow

Shuah is an experienced Linux Kernel developer, maintainer, and contributor. She has extensive experience in open source development, actively working across Linux Kernel sub-systems.

She currently maintains the Kernel Selftest, USB over IP, and cpupower tools. She is an active contributor to the Linux media sub-system.

Shuah has a passion for mentoring and educating the next generation. She loves mentoring and training engineers new to open source and helping them become committers and reviewers.

Mentee: Shefali Sharma

Shefali is a third year Computer Science Engineering student from Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology, Meerut, India. She likes to explore new technical domains. She is very excited to work on the OpenAPS project as it will give her an opportunity to use her technical skills for the welfare of others and to get involved in the Linux kernel community. Apart from this she is also interested in DevOps and Machine Learning.

Mar 23

The ELISA Project Strengthens its Focus on Automotive Use Cases with Expertise from New Members Automotive Intelligence and Control of China, LOTUS Cars and ZTE

By maemalynn Announcement, Workshop

Register for the ELISA Spring Workshop on April 5-7 to Learn More

SAN FRANCISCO – March 23, 2022 – Today, the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project, an open source initiative that aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems, announced a stronger ecosystem focused on automotive use cases with the addition of the Automotive Intelligence and Control of China (AICC), LOTUS Cars and ZTE.

“The ELISA ecosystem continues to grow globally with strong support from automakers across Asia and Europe,” Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation. “By leveraging the expertise of current and new ELISA Project members, we are defining the best practices for use of Linux in the automobiles of the future. “

Linux is used in all major industries because it can enable faster time to market for new features and take advantage of the quality of the code development processes. Launched in February 2019 by the Linux Foundation, ELISA works with Linux kernel and safety communities to agree on what should be considered when Linux is to be used in safety-critical systems. The project has several dedicated working groups that focus on providing resources for System integrators to apply and use to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively on their systems.

The Automotive Working Group discusses the conditions and prerequisites the automotive sector needs to integrate Linux into a safety critical system. The group, which includes collaboration from ADIT, Arm, Codethink, Evidence (a part of Huawei), Red Hat and Toyota, focuses on actual use cases from the Automotive domain to derive the technical requirements to the kernel as a basis for investigation within the Architecture Workgroup and to serve as a blueprint for actual projects in the future. There is also close collaboration with Automotive Grade Linux, which results in a meta-ELISA layer enhancing the instrument cluster demo for safety relevant parts. As leaders in the automotive industry, AICC, LOTUS Cars and ZTE will most likely join the Automotive Working Group.

New Global Automotive Expertise

As the industry’s leading ICV computing infrastructure company, AICC is committed to providing OEMs with intelligent vehicle computing platforms and digital bases for empowering them the differentiated application development ability. In November 2021, AICC released iVBB2.0 series products, which takes ICVOS as the core product, then develops ICVHW, ICVSEC, ICVEC, and other product units. Currently, iVBB2.0 has been delivered to many OEMs and achieved collaboration on cross-platform development, co-built SDV, multi-chip distributed deployment, data security policy deployment and car cloud collaborative computing.

“Becoming a member of the ELISA Project, is in line with the high real-time, high-security, and high-reliability commitment that AICC has always made,” said Dr. Jin Shang, CEO & CTO of AICC. “This will provide a guarantee for the mass production development of AICC’s ICV computing infrastructure platform from security and quality perspectives. Based on the elements, tools, and processes shared by ELISA, AICC will build safety-critical applications and systems relating to Linux requirements, leading to widely used and internationally influential products.”

LOTUS Cars, which was honored as “Manufacturer of the Year” at the News UK Motor Awards in 2021, is focused on the safety of intelligent driving. It is a world-famous manufacturer of sports cars and racing cars noted for their light weight and fine handling characteristics.

“Functional safety is critical to intelligent driving,” said Jie Deng, LOTUS Cars In-Vehicle Operating System Lead. “LOTUS focuses on ‘track-level intelligent drive‘ and is committed to ensuring that drivers stay away from risks through active redundancy of software and hardware. We are very excited to join the ELISA Project and work with industry experts to productize Linux-based safety-critical systems for more drivers to experience intelligent driving in a highly safe and fun way.”

ZTE Corporation is a global leader in telecommunications and information technology. Founded in 1985, the company has been committed to providing innovative technologies and integrated solutions for operators, government and consumers from over 160 countries. ZTE has established 11 state-of-the-art global R&D centers and 5 intelligent manufacturing bases.

Relying on key technologies and core capabilities in the communications field, ZTE Automotive Electronics is committed to becoming a digital vehicle infrastructure capability provider and an independent high-performance partner in China, facilitating the intelligent and networked development in the automobile field. ZTE has been dedicated to GoldenOS R&D for more than 20 years. On this basis, ZTE proposes the integrated automotive operating system solution of high-performance embedded Linux and high security microkernel OS/Hypervisor, covering all scenarios of intelligent vehicle control, intelligent driving, intelligent cockpit and intelligent network connectivities.

These new members join ADIT, AISIN AW CO., Arm, Automotive Grade Linux, Banma, BMW Car IT GmbH, Codethink, Elektrobit, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, Intel, Toyota, Kuka, Linuxtronix. Mentor, NVIDIA, SUSE, Suzuki, Wind River, OTH Regensburg and Toyota.

The Spring Workshop

ELISA Project members will come together for its quarterly Spring Workshop on April 5-7 to learn about the latest developments, working group updates, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry. Hosted online, this workshop is free and open to the public. Details and registration information can be found here.

Workshop highlights include:

A keynote by Robert Martin, Senior Principal Engineer at MITRE Corporation, about “Software Supply Chain Integrity Transparency & Trustworthiness and Related Community Efforts.” The presentation will discuss the capabilities emerging across industry and government to assess and address the challenges to providing trustworthy software supplies with assurance of integrity and transparency to their composition, source, and veracity – the building blocks of software supply chains we can gain justifiable confidence in at scale and speed.
A session by Christopher Temple, Lead Safety & Reliability Systems Architect at Arm Germany GmbH, and Paul Albertella, Consultant at Codethink, about “Mixed-Criticality Processing on Linux.” This talk will help create a common understanding of mixed-criticality processing on Linux and the related problems, collect and discuss alternatives for addressing the problems.
A discussion led by Philipp Ahmann, Business Development Manager at Robert Bosch GmbH, about a new Industrial IoT (IIoT) Working Group within ELISA. The open forum will allow the community to discuss framing lightweight SOUP safety standards, but focusing on those touch points which are not fully covered by other use case driven working groups.

Speakers include thought leaders from ADIT GmbH, Arm, Bosch GmbH, Bytedance, Codethink, Huawei, Mobileye, The Linux Foundation, MITRE Corporation and Red Hat. Check out the schedule and register to attend the workshop today.

For more information about ELISA, visit https://elisa.tech/.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

###

Feb 16

ELISA Spring 2022 Workshop

By maemalynn Blog, Workshop

Today, the ELISA Project is excited to announce the Spring 2022 Workshop will take place virtually on April 5-7 and has opened a Call for Proposals (CFP) as well as registration.

The ELISA Workshop series is focused on the exchange of ideas and feedback from the Linux kernel and Safety communities, as productive collaboration to make tangible progress toward achieving the mission and goals of the ELISA Project. The workshops also provide project and working group overviews for new community members who are interested in advancing topics relevant to functional safety and Linux applications.

Submit a CFP

To encourage open collaboration and stimulate discussions, we invite our members, developers, and industry experts to submit a speaking proposal by March 4. Submit a speaking proposal here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/elisa-workshop-spring/program/cfp/.

Register today

It is free to attend ELISA Workshops but we require registration. Register here.

Missed the November Workshop?

Philipp Ahmann, ELISA Project Ambassador and Technical Steering Committee member, recapped the successful event and highlighted a few of the sessions. You can read the blog or watch the videos here.

If you have any questions about the event, please reach out to events@elisa.tech.

Dec 20

ELISA Ambassador: Elana Copperman

By maemalynn Ambassador Spotlight, Ambassadors, Blog

ELISA Ambassadors are technical leaders who are passionate about the mission of the ELISA Project, recognized for their expertise in functional safety and linux kernel development, and willing to help others to learn about the community and how to contribute.

Each month, we’ll put a spotlight on an ELISA Ambassador. Today, we’re excited to highlight Elana Copperman, PhD, ELISA ambassador, Chair of the Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems (LFSCS) Working Group and TSC voting member. Elana works as a System Safety Architect in Mobileye, an Intel company, designing features to support safety as well as security features in Mobileye vision products for the automotive domain.

Background Details:

As a System Safety Architect at Mobileye, Elana provides support for designing critical system features in Mobileye products, including system boot; drivers; and Linux infrastructure. Before working at Mobileye, she worked as a Security Architect for Cisco-Il (formerly NDS) and more recently as a security consultant for major European automotive concerns on behalf of various Israeli startups. Most recently, merging with safety constraints in the automotive domain, to deploy secure as well as safe systems. Her research interests focus on software engineering methodologies and security engineering.

Q&A

How long have you been active in open source?

I have been involved in “open source” before it was formalized as we know it today. During my time as an undergraduate student, online software source code was commonly shared as freeware. In fact, even early Unix versions were provided at no cost to academics, and collaborative efforts were supported to some degree.

My PhD research focused on Object-Oriented Programming, including some investigations on Java source code and features. Open source software development, Linux in particular, has evolved since then, including many new challenges and opportunities. For example, setting up and working with Apache Server over Linux OS in the early 1990’s.

Over the last 15 years, Linux has grown to what we know & love today, with its amazing powers. As a system architect, I have been designing systems that empower Linux in embedded systems, first in Set-Top Boxes (for digital broadcasting) and currently in Automotive.

Tell us about your favorite open source project and what problems did it aim to solve?

My favorite open source project focused on security code review with ST (chip vendor) engineers for the optee code, which had been released to Linaro. To see first-hand how open source aligns vendor, kernel and user requirements with features to resolve complex security challenges was mind-blowing.

How long have you been active in the ELISA Project?

I have been active in ELISA for more than 2 years, with active participation in each of the Workshops since joining. I have also presented talks related to Linux kernel features such as CRC pitfalls, eBPF verifier, isolation techniques, and kernel configurations related to safety.

What roles and/or working groups do you have or participate in?

I was the Chair of the Kernel Development Process Working Group, and am currently the new Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems WG. I am learning from the safety experts on board, and my primary contribution is to represent the viewpoint of the application designers and developers who will build Linux-based safety critical systems.

Where do you see the ELISA Project in three years?

My dream for ELISA is to see a community of developers providing kernel modules which may be leveraged for use in safety critical systems. For example, a suite of memory protection mechanisms derived from well defined requirements that may be deployed to protect safety-critical data. Another example, which is in our planned agenda, are test suites for concurrency issues such as deadlock and race conditions, focusing on test plans derived from safety requirements.

What is the biggest strength of the ELISA community?

I think ELISA has matured since its early days and we are currently more structured in our analysis and goals. Our strength is in current efforts to progress and making real contributions to the Linux kernel community.

What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?

Never give up. Be flexible, adapt, adjust – but keep up the hard work.

What technology can you not live without? Why?

My home coffee machine. Drop in for a fresh cup and you will know why.

What part of the world do you live in? Why do you love where you live?

I live in Israel, a tiny multicultural nation at the junction of 3 continents (Europe, Asia, Africa). It has also become a major highway for birds – and a pilgrimage site for bird watchers. A wide variety of species can be viewed making their way south in the fall and back north in the spring. Thomas Krumenacker (German journalist and photographer) wrote a book on “Birds in the Holy Land”.

Now is a great time of year to take a trip to the Hula Valley Nature Reserve, to get a view of some of the estimated 500 million migrating birds passing over the Hula Valley and stopping by for a drink of water. This exemplifies the amazing diversity of the people and wildlife of our small fast-paced country.

What’s your favorite quote?

3 Fun facts:

My first computer was a PCJr, with 64 Kb of memory, and with virtually no hardware or software. I had to install all my own hardware add-ons and get it to work, including etching bit maps for the Hebrew alphabet in memory and getting it to work from right to left. After adding more and more components to the motherboard, one day it blew up. But I had a lot of fun with it until that happened.

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_PCB_Jr_Internal.jpg*

As a grad student at NYU, we had loads of fun playing with early internet protocols and collaboration tools, including gopher and kermit; getting our hands dirty (“finger”) working with each other’s systems; and Mosaic (an early Web browser). The crazy things we did over the internet taught me a lot about potential security issues related to networking. This expertise was the foundation for my more recent work in security and safety engineering.

As chair of the Computer Department at the Jerusalem College, we aimed high but with a low budget. Trying to keep up to date with educational (i.e., no support or documentation) versions of closed source software was a real challenge. I became adept at finding contacts working with major software vendors who were willing to break down the walls, expose the source code and support my customization for our needs. In a sense, challenging proprietary software in open-source development mode …

To learn more about ELISA ambassadors, please click here.

Nov 11

Open Source Summit (Sept 2021) Video: A Maintainable, Scalable, and Verifiable SW Qualification Approach for Automotive in Linux

By maemalynn Blog, Industry Conference

Open Source Summit and Embedded Linux Conference, held in Seattle, Washington as well as virtually on September 27-30, gathered 1,944 total attendees. Approximately, 482 of those attended in person from 760 organizations across 68 countries around the globe. Learn more about the event in the post-event report here.

The ELISA Project was represented by Gabriele Paoloni, Chair of the ELISA Project Governing Board and Open Source Tech Lead (Functional Safety) at Red Hat, and Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, a member of the ELISA community and Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat. Gab and Daniel presented a talk about how to create a maintainable, scalable and verifiable SW qualification approach for automotive in linux. Watch the video below.

Over the last years, many discussions took place in Linux Foundation’s ELISA Working Groups about possible approaches to qualify Linux for safety-critical systems. To achieve this goal, an architectural description of the Linux kernel is required.

The challenge though is to find the adequate granularity for description: It must be precise enough to support safety analyses, but it cannot be too fine-grained to the point of being unmanageable. A promising approach is to leverage the ISO26262-6 and ISO26262-8 together, in a hierarchical incremental approach. Optimizing the amount of produced documentation and collaterals.

In this video, the foundations of this approach were presented. Gab and Daniel showcase why this approach is suitable for safety application as well as out-of-context using assuming safety requirements and why it provides natural scalability across different use-cases. Finally, considerations will be made with respect to available tools and mechanisms already implemented or proposed in Linux that can significantly help with the above-mentioned approach – including a detailed discussion about how to cross verify, and monitor, the documentation and the kernel using the Runtime Verification subsystem.

Oct 27

Welcome Jeffrey Osier-Mixon and John MacGregor as new ELISA Ambassadors!

By maemalynn Ambassadors, Announcement, Blog

Today, we announce two new ambassadors – Jeffrey Osier-Mixon, Principal Community Architect at Red Hat, and John MacGregor, a thought leader with several decades of experience in software technology. Learn more about Jeffrey and John below.

Jeffrey “Jefro” Osier-Mixon:

Jefro currently focuses on automotive efforts. As a community architect, Jefro is responsible for maintaining Red Hat’s relationship with automotive-oriented communities, and he acts as the current chair for the CentOS Automotive Special Interest Group.Jefro has worked in open source for nearly three decades, having started his career as a technical writer with Cygnus Support working on documentation for the GNU tools. He has worked with Wind River and Montavista/Cavium Networks on embedded operating systems, and spent five years at Transmeta. He switched careers in 2011 and went to Intel to serve as the community and program manager for the Yocto Project, where he was the board chair for 7 years. During that time, he also helped launch Zephyr and Project ACRN. Most recently, he spent two years at the Linux Foundation as a program manager for RISC-V International and LF Energy.Jefro has been on the program committee for the Embedded Linux Conference series since 2010, and he speaks regularly at open source conferences. It’s best to catch him after the coffee kicks in.

John MacGregor:

John is currently spicing up his retirement by participating in various ELISA working groups. He started his long career as a scientific programmer, switched to Unix programmer and system architect, then progressed to project manager in telecommunications. He worked for several decades as Senior Expert for Software Technology in the Corporate Research Division of Robert Bosch GmbH. Among other things, he worked on software process improvement, software reuse, automotive software architecture and IoT technologies. Before retiring, John participated in the SIL2LinuxMP project, which focused on certifying Linux under IEC 61508 at the SIL2 level, and then continued to contribute to the ELISA project.

John holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, specializing in operations research and information systems, as well as an MBA, specializing in marketing and finance.

Learn more about other ELISA Ambassadors here: https://elisa.tech/community/ambassadors/ Or, if you’re currently participating in the project and would like to become an ambassador, you can apply here.

Oct 21

ELISA Working Groups

By maemalynn Blog, Working Group, Workshop

Since launch in February 2019, the ELISA Project has created several working groups that collaborate and work towards providing resources for System integrators to apply and use to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively on their systems. Current groups include an Automotive Working Group, Medical Devices Working Group, Safety Architecture Working Group and Tool Investigation and Code Improvement Sub-Working Group to focus on specific activities and goals.

If you’re interested in learning more about the goals and objectives for these working groups or asking questions, we invite you to the ELISA Workshop on November 8-10. The virtual workshop, which is free to attend, will host speakers from Arm, Codethink, Elektrobit Automotive GmbH, Evidence Srl, Google, Intel, Mobileye, The Linux Foundation, Red Hat and UL LLC.

On Monday, November 8 at 5-6 am PDT, the working group chairs will provide updates on all activities. Led by Gabriele Paoloni, Lukas Bulwahn, Kate Stewart, Shuah Khan, Milan Lakhani, Jason Smith, Jochen Kall and Philipp Ahmann, you can add this to your schedule here.

Additionally, we also recently announced two more working groups:

Open Source Engineering Process Working Group: This working group aims to examine safety-related claims that we might like to make about Linux as part of a system, and to explore how we can gather and present evidence to support such claims.

Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems Working Group: This working group will work to bring together kernel developers and producers of safety critical systems to demonstrate use of such features in real systems, and to learn from these experiences together as a community.

If you want to learn more about these two new working groups, we invite you to the session on November 8 at 6-630 am PDT lead by Paul Albertella and Elana Copperman. Add this to your schedule here.

To register or to review the complete schedule, click here: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/elisa-workshop/program/schedule/.

Oct 20

The ELISA Project Continues to Grow its Global Ecosystem by Welcoming Red Hat as a Premier Member and Banma, Lotus Cars and SUSE

By maemalynn Announcement, News, Working Group, Workshop

Schedule for the ELISA Fall Workshop on November 8-10 is now live

SAN FRANCISCO – October 20, 2021 – Today, the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project, an open source initiative that aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems, announced that Red Hat has upgraded its membership to premier member and welcomes Banma, Lotus Cars and SUSE as the newest members.

“Linux underpins many applications today that have safety-critical and cybersecurity implications,” said Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation. “By collaborating together, the ELISA members are defining the best practices for use of Linux in these systems. We look forward to continuing to build consensus and welcoming expertise and collaboration from these new members.”

Attend the Fall Workshop

Since its inception, ELISA has hosted quarterly workshops that bring together project members and community contributors to discuss working group updates, trends in functional safety, use cases and more. The next workshop will be held virtually on November 8-10 and is free to attend. Speakers include thought leaders from Arm, Codethink, Elektrobit Automotive GmbH, Evidence Srl, Google, Intel, Mobileye, The Linux Foundation, Red Hat and UL LLC. Register and check out the schedule: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/elisa-workshop/.

Join the New Working Groups

Since launch, the project has worked to establish a governance model that creates processes and guidance to the focused working groups that aim to provide resources for System integrators to apply and use to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively on their systems. Today, ELISA announces two new working groups:

Open Source Engineering Process Working Group: This working group aims to examine safety-related claims that we might like to make about Linux as part of a system, and to explore how we can gather and present evidence to support such claims.

Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems Working Group: This working group will work to bring together kernel developers and producers of safety critical systems to demonstrate use of such features in real systems, and to learn from these experiences together as a community. Learn more about this new working group in this November Workshop session.

Learn more about the Global Ecosystem

Red Hat, which is known for its leadership in linux and open source, joined ELISA earlier this year and has been very active in the technical community. With their upgraded membership to Premier, Red Hat welcomes Gabriele Paoloni, Open Source Community Technical Leader at Red Hat, as the ELISA Project Governing Board Chair.

“Red Hat announced our intent to expand our expertise in Linux to safety-critical automotive use cases earlier this year as we work to develop a Linux in-vehicle operating system,” said Francis Chow, vice president, In-Vehicle Operating System, Red Hat. “As such, we’re pleased to extend our participation in ELISA as a Premier member and collaborate with other industry leaders in building up open source software for applications that require extremely high levels of trust and functional safety. We believe a standardized common set of tools and processes can drive innovation toward the software-defined vehicle. ”

Additionally, ELISA welcomes Banma, a Chinese startup specializing in automotive software; Lotus Cars, a leader in automotive manufacturing in China; and SUSE, a global leader in open source software specializing in enterprise Linux, Kubernetes management, and edge solutions. These new members join ADIT, AISIN AW CO., arm, Automotive Grade Linux, BMW Car IT GmbH, Codethink, Elektrobit, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, Intel, Toyota, Kuka, Linuxtronix. Mentor, NVIDIA, Suzuki, Wind River, OTH Regensburg and Toyota.

“Compared with other open software, safety is the key differentiation of automotive OS”, said Sean Xiao, Chief Architect at Banma. “The mission of Banma is to help automotive makers deliver intelligent cars by offering advanced vehicle open software. The ELISA Project combines safety and linux, which offers flexibility and openness, and closely aligns with our goals.”

“For nearly 30 years, SUSE has been a trusted partner supporting systems and essential workloads in some of the most challenging and critical industries in terms of safety requirements, such as automotive and transportation, government, aerospace and defense, industrial and manufacturing, and healthcare,” said Ivo Totev, SUSE COO. “We already collaborate with current ELISA members on important initiatives and are pleased to join ELISA as a formal member to continue to provide innovation in safety-critical domains.”

For more information about ELISA, visit https://elisa.tech/.

About The Linux Foundation

###

Oct 13

ELISA Ambassador: Philipp Ahmann

By maemalynn Ambassador Spotlight, Blog

Each month, we’ll put a spotlight on an ELISA Ambassador. Today, we’re excited to highlight Philipp Ahmann, ambassador and TSC member within the ELISA project as well as software manager at ADIT (a joint venture of Robert Bosch GmbH and DENSO Corporation).

Background Details:

Philipp Ahmann is manager at ADIT (a joint venture of Robert Bosch GmbH and DENSO Corporation) and has been participating in the ELISA project since the start.

He has more than ten years of experience in automotive infotainment base platforms, utilizing complex multi-core system-on-chips (SoCs). Also, he is leading a group of engineers who are responsible for software integration (CI/CD), testing, development infrastructure and tooling within ADIT.

His automotive expertise started with integration of components in SoC hardware and printed circuit board (PCB) design for the same. From there, Philipp moved over to the field of software development with initial responsibility for bootloader and Linux software board bringup.

After working within the Linaro community and several years as lead of the test development within ADIT, he became software project leader. The projects mainly target OSS based in-vehicle-infotainment base platforms on various hardware variants. Nowadays also build infrastructure as well as software base platforms for autonomous driving products are in his responsibility.

Q&A

How long have you been active in open source?

My first open source work was done as a user. While I was studying in Sweden in 2006, a friend and I collected old university PCs from the electronic scrap and installed Ubuntu 6.10 on them. Afterwards we maintained and distributed them to exchange students who couldn’t afford an own laptop or PC.

Really active in open source, I became a member of the Freescale landing team within Linaro in 2011 to drive ARM Kernel and BSP development for i.mx6 SoC forward.

Tell us about your favorite open source project and what problems did it aim to solve?

It is really hard to define my favorite open source project as they are everywhere in my life. My private NextCloudPi gives me full control over my data. Home Assistant integrated perfectly with ESPHome and is helping me to automate tasks in my flat and surrounding for higher convenience and energy savings. LineageOS, CarbonROM, /e/ brought back new life to old smartphones serving as daily drivers for my kids and parents making technology more sustainable.

Thanks to projects likes Linux Mint, which shows decent performance even on old devices, old PCs and laptops get a second life. On devices tools like LibreOffice, Red Notebook, Freeplane, Arduino IDE, VS Code and others, help me to structure my day and increase productivity. For fun and entertainment there are projects such as Kodi and RetroPie.

Overall, I am pretty sure everyone touches open source at one time or another, since open source software rules the world. It is there, where people need it. From the people for the people. A big thanks and kudos to all of you who participate in open source projects.

What roles and/or working groups do you have or participate in?

I am acting as an ELISA ambassador and was recently elected as a technical steering committee member.

I host meetings, act as moderator, write minutes and jump in where I can help to drive topics forward and where my support is needed or wished. For technical content, I mainly contribute within the Automotive Working Group, where I benefit from my many years background in Linux for Automotive.

Where do you see the ELISA Project in three years?

Since I am primarily active in the Automotive WG, I would like to try to make a forecast for this group. In 3 years, we will have completed and showcased our first use case, which is a telltale application.The created work products will act as a blueprint to get the first fully Linux-based instrument cluster on the market.

What is the biggest strength of the ELISA community?

The biggest strength of the ELISA community is the diversity, which we achieve with experts from many different working fields, domains, industries and interests from all across the globe. The diversity of perspectives, coupled with the transparency and communication, is crucial to the success of safety relevant projects. By sharing our concepts, we get a lot of feedback from e.g. the Linux and the safety community. Of course there are passionate in-depth difficult discussions, but these are open and not driven by commercial interests. Risks, potential gaps or also any other concern is addressed from the beginning.

If we continue on this path, the results from the ELISA community can act as state-of-art technology and as a benchmark for many safety critical systems in the future. We contribute to a safer world.

What’s your favorite quote?

“Be yourself (no matter what they say)” – by Sting

3 Fun Facts:

I once repaired an entertainment system of a plane during the flight and asked the pilot if he could use the internet connection in the cockpit to search for a Windows NT dll file for me. If you are curious about the root cause, get in touch with me.

Already twice I have been on an overseas business trip and my luggage was delayed for so long that it got delivered only the day before departing again. Luckily, I bought at least a T-Shirt in Paris before going to NYC.

I built an Arudino based music player with RFID and arcade button control. It took me a year from the first PoC to be robust enough for my kids. At the time I was done, my daughter learnt how to use an Android phone and preferred a touch display and cover flow. So I put a custom rom on a phone, flashed it, and removed any unintended services to make it a kids-ready data-privacy device. This took me only a week in the end.

To learn more about ELISA ambassadors, please click here.

Sep 16

Updated w/ Video: ELISA Project @ Linux Plumbers Conference

By maemalynn Blog, Industry Conference

The Linux Plumbers Conference, which happened virtually on September 20-24, had a packed schedule of microconferences and tracks for the kernel, networking & BPF, GNU Tools, Birds of Feather and more. To see the complete schedule, check out the main conference page at https://www.linuxplumbersconf.org/event/11/.

Shuah Khan, Chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee and a Kernel Maintainer and Linux Fellow at the Linux Foundation, teamed up with Gabriele Paoloni, Chair of the ELISA Project Governing Board, Safety Architecture Working Group Chair and an Open Source Community Technical Leader at Red Hat, to run the Kernel Dependability and Assurance Microconference on Thursday, September 23. The Kernel Dependability and Assurance Microconference focused on infrastructure to be able to assure software quality and that the Linux kernel is dependable in applications that require predictability and trust.

If you missed the conference, you can watch the video below.

Additionally, several other ELISA Project ambassadors and community members presented sessions including Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Sudip Mukherjee, a Kernel Engineer at Codethink, and Lukas Bulwahn with Elektrobit GmbH.

Check out the schedule below for the Microconference on Thursday, September 23 at 7 – 11 am PDT.

All the Linux Plumbers live stream videos can be found here: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVsQ_xZBEyN2c21jFUgqI2iMa094zXanH.