ELISA Summit Archives

Jan 11

My ELISA Mentorship

By ELISA Blog, ELISA Summit, Mentorship

Shefali Sharma, a senior student at the Meerut Institute of Engineering and Technology in India, was a mentee of the ELISA Project starting in March 2022. Her mentors were Shuah Khan, Linux Fellow and Kernel Maintainer at the Linux Foundation and Chair of the ELISA Technical Steering Committee at that time, and Milan Lakhani, Co-Chair of the ELISA Medical Devices Working Group and Software Engineer at Codethink. During her mentorship, Shefali learned a lot about the Linux kernel, Core C programming, and various tools and techniques for analyzing the kernel like strace, ftrace, cscope, perf.

Shefali will be sharing her key learnings on Thursday, January 19 at 12:33-12:43 am ET at the LFX Mentorship Showcase, a virtual event that gives Linux Foundation mentees an opportunity to present their experience with their mentorship. This virtual event, which takes place on January 18-19, is free to attend and open to anyone who would like to learn more about the experiences of LF Mentorship Program mentees, find out more about some of the programs our projects are working on, recruit new talent, and support new developer contributions. Register for the free event here.

If you can’t make the LFX Mentorship Showcase, you can check out her findings in this video from the ELISA Summit (September 2022) about kernel tracing.

You can also learn more in Shefali’s Medium blog here.

Nov 30

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Bosch and XPENG Motors join the ELISA Project to Strengthen their Commitment to Safety-Critical Applications in Automobiles

By maemalynn Announcement, ELISA Summit, Industry Conference, News

SAN FRANCISCO – November 30, 2022 – Today, the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project announced that Robert Bosch GmbH and XPENG Motors have joined the project, marking its commitment to Linux and its effective use in safety-critical applications in connected cars. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, ELISA is 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.

Bosch is one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers. Bosch solutions combine automotive software know-how across all domains with expertise in electrical/electronic architecture of large integrated systems, complex real-time software, IoT, and automotive hardware. Their middleware offers functional safety, real-time behavior, and reliability under automotive requirements, combined with cyber-security. The Bosch experience and formal membership in ELISA fits well within the project goals and mission.

“Increasing product complexity and driving requirements in various areas of the software defined vehicle towards mixed-critical workloads requires thinking and going new ways to widen traditional approaches of systems engineering. Due to Bosch’s existing expertise in Linux and functional safety, the formal membership of Bosch within the ELISA project is a logical and consequent step,” said Philipp Ahmann, Business Development Manager – Embedded Open Source, Cross-Domain Computing Solutions at Robert Bosch GmbH. “The enthusiastic collaboration between functional safety experts combined with the recent excellent contributions from Linux experts are adding the value and momentum needed to enable Linux in safety applications and to make ELISA a success story.”

Earlier this month, Philipp Ahmann was nominated and elected as the new Chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee (TSC). He has been involved in the ELISA Project since May 2019 as an ambassador and member of the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) who has written blogs and given presentations in various Linux Foundation conferences and industry shows.

Philipp Ahmann steps into this role after TSC Chair Shuah Khan, Linux Fellow and Kernel Maintainer at The Linux Foundation, who has helped build the technical governance of the project and advance its mission and goals for more than two years. She will continue to contribute to the ELISA by helping Philipp Ahmann in his TSC role and supporting the working group leads.

“Philipp has made vast contributions during his time with the ELISA Project,” said Shuah Khan. “Since the day he joined the community, he’s been actively involved and has led the Automotive Working Group to real-world use cases like tell tales. His leadership will play an important role in setting up priorities and in providing guidance to the project. We are very excited about this next step in our evolution as an open source project setting the standard for safety-critical applications.”

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, ELISA works with Linux kernel and safety communities to agree on what should be considered when Linux is 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.

ELISA is open to everyone. Anyone can develop and contribute code, get elected to the Technical Steering Committee, or help steer the project forward in any number of ways.

Developers who are elected to the Technical Steering Committee or who participate as project leaders will provide leadership regarding the technical direction.

XPENG Motors, a leading Chinese smart EV company with hubs in China, the United States, and Europe, was founded in 2014 with a belief that technology is bound to transform the future of mobility.

“We are a technology company at heart. By addressing the needs of our customers with our expertise, we can solve the complicated questions in unchartered territory,” said Yu Peng, Embedded Systems General Manager at XPENG Motors. “We recognize the crucial and diverse role mobility plays in people’s lives, and aspire to expand future mobility through intelligent revolution, from the road to the air.”

“We joined ELISA because we wanted to get more technology and experience in improving the functional safety and stability of Linux-based system software. Through communications and participation, we hope the ELISA Project helps us to make products safer and more reliable,” said Peng.

Other ELISA Project members include ADIT, AISIN AW CO., Arm, Automotive Grade Linux, Automotive Intelligence and Control of China, Banma, Boeing, BMW Car IT GmbH, Codethink, Elektrobit, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, Intel, Lotus Cars, Toyota, Kuka, Linuxtronix. Mentor, NVIDIA, SUSE, Suzuki, Wind River, OTH Regensburg, Toyota and ZTE.

ELISA Presentations

The ELISA Project will be represented at Open Source Summit Japan, hosted on December 5-6 in Yokohama, Japan, and virtually. Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation, will give a keynote address titled “Japan’s Critical Infrastructure – Open Source Evolution,” on Tuesday, December 6 that will feature ELISA and a few other open source projects. On Wednesday, December 7, there will be an ELISA Mini-Summit that will offer a deep dive into the mission of the project and activities of the various working groups. There is a $10 fee when adding the ELISA Summit to the Open Source Summit Japan registration. Learn more about the conference or register here.

ELISA Summit: Trusted Execution Inside Secure Enclaves (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit

An estimated 185 people registered for the ELISA Summit, which took place virtually on September 7-8 to gather Linux community members and attendees from around the world. The event, which featured 15 sessions and 20 speakers, was open to anyone involved or interested in defining, using, or learning about common elements, processes, and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Members of the ELISA Project community presented best practices and overviews on emerging trends and hot topics to using open source software in safety-critical applications and detailed working group updates.

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by Işıl Öz, Assistant Professor, Izmir Institute of Technology and Elana Copperman, System Architect, Mobileye. They gives an overview on the topic “Trusted Execution Inside Secure Enclaves“.

Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), which are hardware-implemented encryption technologies, ensure that applications work in an encrypted and secure way by protecting them from the operating system or other programs. While the sensitive data and code are stored inside private regions of enclave memory, unauthorized entities cannot modify them.

In this talk, the speakers will share basics about enclave memories and their usage scenarios. They will talk about open-source projects on Intel SGX technology and our experience in our ELISA mentorship program. In addition to that, the topics also include the safety issues with security aspects and mention about the impact of secure enclave implementations for safety-critical systems.

Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

For more details about the ELISA Project, visit the main website here.

Nov 23

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ELISA Summit: Analysis of eBPF for Safety Use Case (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit, Mentorship

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by Elana Copperman, Mobileye & Jules Irenge, Linux Foundation Mentee. They will be sharing their insights on the topic “eBPF for safety use cases”.

Jules shares his experience of working as part of the LXF/ELISA Mentorship Program. The program is focused on ebpf and xdp.

On one hand, eBPF is a kernel mechanism that provides a sandboxed runtime environment in the Linux kernel without changing kernel source code or loading kernel modules.

eBPF programs can be attached to various kernel subsystems, including networking, tracing and Linux security modules (LSM).

On the other, eXpress Data Path (xdp) is a technology that enables high performance data communication, bypassing most of the operating system networking stack using eBPF.

Elana shares an analysis of eBPF for safety, focusing on xdp, and demonstrate how these can be used for safety.

In the process she showcase eBPF /xdp tools that do and count how many packets have been accepted, rejected or redirected and how this can be used for tracing.

The goal of this presentation is to guide system administrators and programmers to consider using this technology to improve on software safety.

To learn more, watch the video below.

For more details about the ELISA Project, visit the main website here.

Nov 18

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ELISA Summit : Using memory access error detection (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by Priyanka Verma, Senior Software Quality Engineer, Red Hat GmbH and Dennis Brendel, Senior Software Quality Engineer, Red Hat on the topic “Using memory access error detection for safety argumentation”.

Kernel Electric-Fence (KFENCE) and Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) are memory safety error detectors with support in the Linux kernel. This presentation explores how well KASAN and KFENCE detect different types of memory access errors with various configuration settings to assess the suitability of these memory access sanitizers to develop safety argumentation.

Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

For more details about the ELISA Project, visit the main website here.

Nov 16

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ELISA Summit : AUTOSAR Adaptive Applications in Rust (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by Christof Petig, Advanced Software Developer, Aptiv Services Deutschland GmbH and Huzaifa Saadat, Head of Center of Excellence AUTOSAR, Alten GmbH on the topic “AUTOSAR Adaptive Applications in Rust”. The talk mainly focuses on the introduction to AUTOSAR adaptive, benefits of Rust wrt FuSa, presenting specific techniques for Rust C++ interaction within AUTOSAR adaptive, outlook towards Rust for AUTOSAR classic.

Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

For more details about the ELISA Project, visit the main website here.

Nov 11

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ELISA Summit: Medical Devices Working Group Update (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit, Working Group

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by the team members from ELISA Medical Device Working Group: Jason Smith, Jeffrey (Jefro) Osier-Mixon, Kate Stewart, Milan Lakhani,Nicole Pappler, Shefali Sharma, Shuah Khan on the topic of Medical Device Working Group update.

The main goal of this working group is to develop best practices to analyze systems and identify the components of Linux that will be participating in safety analysis, in the context of medical device safety standards. The main activities include

Analysis of open source medical device application (openAPS)
Create documentation of results of STPA analysis (system, requirements, architecture, design, …)
Comparison of results of STPA analysis to 62304 Software of Unknown Provenance (SOUP)
Create documentation on usage of tooling to support kernel analysis

In this session, the team shares progress to date, as well as some of the lessons learned and areas where they could use some help. The deliverables being worked on for the next quarter will be previewed as well.

Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

For more details about the ELISA Project, visit the main website here. To learn more about the Medical Device Working Group or to join the community, click here.

Nov 09

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ELISA Summit: Kernel Tracing (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit, Working Group

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by Shefali Sharma, Senior year CSE Student, India and LFX Mentee at ELISA Medical Devices WG on the topic “Kernel Tracing.” In this video, Shefali presents the work she did during her ELISA Mentorship Program including:

Understanding system resources necessary to build and run a workload is important.
The highlights of theLinux tracing and strace can be used to discover the system resources in use by a workload.
The completeness of the system usage information depends on the completeness of coverage of a workload.
Performance and security of the operating system can be analyzed with the help of tools like ftrace, perf, stress-ng, paxtest.
Once we discover and understand the workload needs, we can focus on them to avoid regressions and use it to evaluate safety considerations.

In addition to these topics, she also explains about her mentorship experience with ELISA Medical Working Group. Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

If you’re interested in becoming a ELISA Project or Linux Foundation mentee, you can review mentorships and all here: https://lfx.linuxfoundation.org/tools/mentorship/.

Nov 04

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ELISA Summit: Generation of Static Architecture Diagrams for Specific Kernel Images (Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit, Working Group

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today, we focus on a session presented by Alessandro Carminati, Red Hat and Maurizio Papini, Red Hat on the topic “Generation of Static Architecture Diagrams for Specific Kernel Images.”

In this talk, the experts shared how they generated a static architecture diagram of the Kernel based on radare2. To analyze the kernel for safety is challenging since it is a huge monolithic piece of code. Subsystems exist within the kernel, but they are not well defined nor documented. ISO26262 part6 requires a ‘Software architectural design specification’ that can be used to support safety analysis and drive the function of tests.

Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

Nov 02

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ELISA Summit: Automotive Working Group Update – Tell-tales an Evolution Use Case Towards Driver Assistance ?!(Video)

By Susan Remmert Blog, ELISA Summit, Working Group

We’ll be featuring event videos in blogs each week. Today we’ll feature the session by Philipp Ahmann, Robert Bosch GmbH supported by work from Paul Albertella, Codethink, and Christopher Temple, Arm on the topic Automotive Working Group Update – Tell tales an evolution use case towards driver assistance.

The session mainly covered the topics such as what is a tell tale and why is it the use case of the Automotive WG? What is STPA and advantages of it. This session gave an update on the latest activities of the Automotive Working Group status. Focus was put on the explanation why the Automotive Working Group has selected the use case of “safe displaying of warning signs on instrument cockpit” also called “telltales”. The benefits of the use case is illustrated as well. The relationship to other use cases is provided and the natural evolution to other automotive use cases like driver assistance features is shown.

Watch the video below or check out the presentation materials here.

To learn more about the Automotive Working Group or to join the mailing list or meetings, click here.