FOSDEM aka Free and Open Source Software Developers European Meeting is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open source software development that is aimed at developers. FOSDEM is held annually, usually during the first weekend of February, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles Solbosch campus in the southeast of Brussels, Belgium.
CNCF was an official sponsor and experts from various Linux Foundation projects came together to give keynotes and co-host devrooms including Embedded, Mobile & Automotive, Energy and SBOM.
In case you haven’t met the newly launched Linux Foundation Europe team, we invite you to read the latest blog “On the Road in February 2023.”
Philipp Ahmann, Chair of the ELISA Technical Steering Committee and Technical Business Development Manager at Robert Bosch GmbH, gave a presentation at FOSDEM titled, “The ELISA Project – Project insights and overview”. The lecture mainly focused on the goals and technical strategy of the project. It provided information about the different work groups, their interaction, and contributions.
ELISA members are working together to define and maintain a common set of tools and processes that can help companies demonstrate that a specific Linux-based system meets the necessary safety requirements for certification. These existing working groups focus on Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems, Software Architecture, Open Source Engineering Process, Tool Investigation and Code Improvement. They are complemented by vertical use case working groups dealing with Automotive, Medical, and Aerospace.
During the talk, Philipp explained in detail about each working group. Safety Architecture group monitors the kernel for non safety related issues such as the watchdog kernel analysis and try to improve using tools and documentation and it is driven by use cases and demands of the products.
Linux features for safety critical systems group mainly work on the safety criticality part and not the generic features. The main goal is to look for the elements which could improve safety by doing incremental steps to make the system more dependable and robust.
While doing these processes, code quality is very important and hence the tool investigation and code improvement group. The WG uses tools and CI servers to identify the kernel issues and to make the kernel more reliable and robust.
Open Source Engineering Process WG was developed due to the challenges in Engineering. There are rigorous methods within kernel development. There is a strong demand from traditional project management when it comes to safety products. We can see that not every process compliance agrees with it directly. We need to find an equivalent to the open source development process compared to ISO 26262 requests for automotive products.
Systems work group works cross functional and cross projects and combine these elements involved in the above mentioned processes.
In order to tailor the systems accurately with these groups, ELISA Project has vertical use cases such as Aerospace, Automotive. Medical etc.
He also explains how ELISA Project is interacting with other communities such as Xen Project, Zephyr Project on safety critical topics, Automotive Grade Linux, SOAFEE and SDV on automotive use cases and Yocto project for build tooling and SBOM generation and SPDX for system SBOM data requirements.
In addition to the different work groups and their interactions Philipp also explained on the contributions of the different groups, use cases, used methodologies such as STPA and workload tracing and a status update on what to expect from ELISA Project.
As Philipp mentioned, based on George Bernard Shaw’s quote “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas” we need to get a good understanding and bring things together.
Watch Philipp’s talk here: https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/elisa/
We hope you enjoyed attending FOSDEM, met your friends👫 and colleagues and enjoyed the famous Belgium waffles🧇, fries🍟 and Beer🍻.