Industry Conference Archives

Dec 02

What it takes to employ Linux in safety applications : An interview with Shuah Khan

By Susan Remmert Blog, Industry Conference, Mentorship

During the Open Source Summit Europe 2022, Shuah Khan, Linux Kernel Fellow at the Linux Foundation and previously the Chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee, met with Mike Vizard, Chief Content Officer, Techstrong TV, to discuss what it takes to employ Linux in safety applications and why the open source community is still looking to train top-notch maintainers.

This interview narrates the fundamental details that you need to know if you are new to ELISA Project and planning to contribute or get involved in the LF Project or any open source projects under Linux Foundation. The theme of the questions spanned from the need of safety programs and how Linux is involved in safety critical applications to how gender diversity and STEM education plays a role in the open source community and contribution.

ELISA Project as you know is simply defined as Enabling Linux In Safety Applications. Shuah Khan explains how ELISA is involved in many uses like automotive, medical etc and how the community is bringing together the safety experts to maintain safety critical platforms. She also explains with an example on how the project works in an automotive use case. When it comes to safety certification, she explains how ELISA Project is helping with the resources for the community that are planning to certify their safety critical platforms running in Linux. The role of safety experts and the kernel experts are like bread and butter. While safety experts look at the safety angle of the product or platform, kernel experts bridge the gap between safety and kernel.

There are sometimes concerns in people’s minds that in the future the regulators might be asking tough questions about safety when they develop medical, automotive applications. There are also lots of costs involved for these certifications. Considering the economical situation now, how the ELISA project can help the community is worthwhile.

For those who are currently studying or looking to get involved in the ELISA Project to learn more about Kernel and safety certification process, starting from this part (06:00) of the interview is a must watch.

This part explains about the talent ELISA Project is looking for, how LFX mentorship program helps the newcomers to integrate into the open source community, to help the code in and make them an expert in their preferred field.

In many cases, some are often uninformed about the possibilities of learning or don’t know where to start with the open source contribution. What we want to convey is our project has structural programs, resources to work and kernel webinars to learn. At the end of the program, there is also a virtual mentee showcase where the mentees explain about what they have done during the program to the member company representatives which is a potential opportunity for further steps like job or research programs.

The interview also discusses the outreach programs to attract talents from various parts of the world and the STEM initiatives.

We invite you to watch this video to learn more and if it helped you to learn something new, then share it with your communities: https://techstrong.tv/videos/open-source-summit-europe-2022/shuah-khan-the-linux-foundation-open-source-summit-europe-2022.

Learn more about the ELISA Project 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.

Open Source Summit North America (Videos)

By maemalynn Blog, Industry Conference, Working Group

This year, Open Source Summit North America was held as an umbrella conference, composed of a collection of 14 events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today in June. There were a total of 2,771 attendees with 1,286 of those attending in person in Austin, from 1,041 organizations across 68 countries around the globe. The event attracted a diversified mix of open source community members from across the ecosystem. 54% of attendees were in technical positions, and developers comprised more than a quarter of attendees. You can read the post-event report here. You can also view all of the event playlists on the Linux Foundation Youtube Channel.

The ELISA Project was featured in several sessions and represented by ambassadors and community members at the conference. If you missed these presentations, you can watch the videos below:

Enabling Linux in Safety Applications (panel discussion) – Gabriele Paoloni, Red Hat (ELISA board chair) Kate Stewart, Linux Foundation (ELISA Executive Director) Paul Albertella, CodeThink (Open Source Engineering Process) Elana Copperman, Intel (Linux Features) Philipp Ahmann, Bosch GmbH (Automotive) Milan Lakhani, Codethink (Medical Devices)

Meeting business and safety objectives while building safety critical applications is a huge challenge for any industry, particularly those who have not had previous experience with open source and Linux. ELISA’s charter is to help industries navigate technical and non-technical challenges in order to bring the benefits of open source to safety applications and help organizations provide the rigor needed for certification. This panel features ELISA working group leads who will share their vision of making Linux a prominent player for FuSa applications in several industries. Join us to learn more about the project and how you can contribute to the community’s overall success.

Finding the Path from Embedded to Edge using Product Lines – Steffen Evers, Bosch.IO & Philipp Ahmann, Robert Bosch GmBH

Linux is used for many embedded device classes today. However, it is increasingly desirable to connect these devices with each other and with the cloud. Embedded container technology can be used to make this easier by merging server/cloud and embedded technologies. However, it also leads to more challenges e.g. in respect to security, safety, traceability, and SBOMs. Using Linux across multiple device classes and product lines, and adding cloud technology, causes the complexity and efforts to explode.

In this talk, we describe how Bosch, and others, use embedded containers and “reference systems” to avoid redundant work and get a large number of embedded projects under control.

A reference system is an adjustable compilation of tools along with a pre-configured bundle of packages for a common use case and defined set of devices. This reuse significantly reduces development and maintenance costs, and speeds up the time to market. In this way, reference systems can form the base for your product lines.

Bosch uses the in-house Debian-based embedded distribution “Apertis” as the basis for several reference systems, e.g. for automotive infotainment systems. In doing so we push as many efforts as possible from individual projects into Apertis, as the meta-layer. Thereby, the users can focus more on the actual functionality and applications. e.g. one issue that we have addressed in the context of software management is the handling of GPLv3 in embedded devices. Another topic has been mainline support for kernel drivers.

BOF: SBOMs for Embedded Systems: What’s Working? What’s Not? – Kate Stewart

With the recent focus on improving Cybersecurity in IoT & Embedded, the expectation that a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) can be produced, is becoming the norm. Having a clear understanding of the software running on an embedded system, especially in safety critical applications, like medical devices, energy infrastructure, etc. has become essential. Regulatory authorities have recognized this and are starting to expect it as a condition for engagement. This BOF will provide an overview of the emerging regulatory landscape, as well as examples of how SBOMs are already being generated today for embedded systems by open source projects such as Zephyr, Yocto and others, followed by a discussion of the gaps folks are seeing in practice, and ways we might tackle them.

Static Partitioning with Xen, LinuxRT, and Zephyr: A Concrete End-to-end Example – Stefano Stabellini, AMD

Static partitioning enables multiple domains to run alongside each other with no interference. They could be running Linux, an RTOS, or another OS, and all of them have direct access to different portions of the SoC. In the last five years, the Xen community introduced several new features to make Xen-based static partitioning possible. Dom0less to start multiple static domains in parallel at boot, and Cache Coloring to minimize cache interference effects are among them. Static inter-domain communications mechanisms were introduced this year, while “ImageBuilder” has been making system-wide configurations easier. An easy-to-use complete solution is within our grasp. This talk will show the progress made on Xen static partitioning. The audience will learn to configure a realistic reference design with multiple partitions: a LinuxRT partition, a Zephyr partition, and a larger Linux partition. The presentation will show how to set up communication channels and direct hardware access for the domains. It will explain how to measure interrupt latency and use cache coloring to zero cache interference effects. The talk will include a live demo of the reference design.

RTLA: Real-time Linux Analysis Toolset – Daniel Bristot De Oliveira, Red Hat

Currently, Real-time Linux is evaluated using a black-box approach. While the black-box method provides an overview of the system, it fails to provide a root cause analysis for unexpected values. Developers have to use kernel trace features to debug these cases, requiring extensive knowledge about the system and fastidious tracing setup and breakdown. Such analysis will be even more impactful after the PREEMPT_RT merge. To support these cases, since version 5.17, the Linux kernel includes a new tool named rtla, which stands for Real-time Linux Analysis. The rtla is a meta-tool that consists of a set of commands that aims to analyze the real-time properties of Linux. Instead of testing Linux as a black box, rtla leverages kernel tracing capabilities to provide precise information about latencies and root causes of unexpected results. In this talk, Daniel will present two tools provided by rtla. The timerlat tool to measure IRQ and thread latency for interrupt-driven applications and the osnoise tool to evaluate the ability of Linux to isolate workload from the interferences from the rest of the system. The presentation includes examples of how to use the tool to find the root cause analysis and collect extra tracing information directly from the tool.

Aug 10

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Join us at ELISA Project September Events

By ELISA Blog, Industry Conference, News, Working Group, Workshop

Launched in February 2019, the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project 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.

If you’re new to the project and would like to learn more about the community, ELISA has several upcoming events in September that you can attend to meet ambassadors or project members, receive updates about technical milestones and goals of each of the working groups and ask questions or get involved. Focused Working Groups include Automotive, Linux Features for Safety-Critical Systems, Medical Devices, Open Source Engineer Processes, Safety Architecture, Systems and Tool Investigation and Code Improvement and they are always looking for more participants.

September events:

ELISA Summit – Hosted virtually for participants around the world on September 7-8, this event will feature overview of the project, the mission and goals for each working group and an opportunity for attendees to ask questions and network with ELISA leaders. View the schedule here. Registration is free and open to the public. https://elisa.tech/event/elisa-summit-virtual/
ELISA Forum – Hosted in-person in Dublin, Ireland, on September 12, this event takes place the day before Open Source Summit Europe begins. It will feature an update on all of the working groups, an interactive System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) use case and an Ask Me Anything session. Pre-registration is required. To register for ELISA Forum, add it to your Open Source Summit Europe registration.
Open Source Summit Europe – Hosted in-person in Dublin, Ireland, and virtually on September 13-16, ELISA will have two dedicated presentations about enabling safety in safety-critical applications and safety and open source software. Learn more.
ELISA Workshop – Hosted in-person in Manchester, England, at Codethink offices. This workshop offers an opportunity for active ELISA contributors and members to have interactive discussions on predetermined topics and have side-by-side working sessions. Learn more.

Nov 11

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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.

Sep 22

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Updated w/ Video: Where do Security and Safety Meet?

By ELISA Blog, Industry Conference

Written by Elana Copperman, ELISA project ambassador and System Safety Architect at Mobileye (Intel)

This blog has been updated with the video from the Linux Security Summit (LSS), which took place on September 29-October 1.

Are you attending the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) on September 27-30 or the Linux Security Summit (LSS) on September 29-October 1? This year, attendees have the option of joining the conference on-site in Seattle, Washington or virtually from their homes and workplaces.

As an ELISA ambassador, I will be representing the ELISA Project on Thursday Sept 30 at 11:05 am PDT in a virtual presentation titled “Where do Security and Safety Meet?”

Security and Safety have common goals, yet often follow divergent development paths. We will take a look at various Linux features which were originally designed for security, investigating if/how these features may be relevant to enable safety critical applications.

For example, we’ll discuss:

Memory protection features
Isolation techniques and FFI (Freedom From Interference)
Timing and execution
ebpf and profiling
Safety extensions to Linux drivers

I will present practical implications – focusing on where security and safety meet and where they don’t meet. The presentation, which is intended for experienced software developers and architects, will focus on how these features may be used in real systems. The goal is to spark discussion on how safety mechanisms may be designed in Linux-based safety critical systems, by learning from solutions in the security domain. Watch the video below or check out the presentation here.

Click here to register for the Linux Security Summit or here to learn more about the conference.

Sep 16

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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.