Seminar Series

In 2018, in the course of the SIL2LinuxMP project, we summarized the knowledge gained around research questions and suggested potential solutions using Linux in safety-related systems in the paper “Certifying Linux: Lessons Learned in Three Years of SIL2LinuxMP.” Since then, the activities using Linux in safety-related systems has continued to attract more experts and more commercial attention. However, it is still a challenging activity to pursue. In this video, we explain, reflect and comment the areas of work and activities that have been followed the next five years throughout the industry and how they relate, complement initial ideas that were collected in the SIL2LinuxMP project.

As part of the ELISA Seminar series, Lukas Bulwahn, Safety Software Key Expert at Elektrobit, gave a presentation titled, “Certifying Linux: State of the Art and Lessons Learned after 8 Years.“

The ELISA Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend. You can watch all videos on the ELISA Project Youtube Channel ELISA Seminar Series Playlist here.

For more ELISA Project updates, subscribe to @ProjectElisa or our LinkedIn page or our Youtube Channel.

ISO PAS 8926 “Road vehicles – Functional safety – Use of pre-existing software architectural elements” has been approved by the ISO community. This achievement represents a recognition of the work done in the last 2 years by ISO Sub-Group experts from multiple organizations / delegation to include the evaluation of pre-existing complex software for Functional Safety without losing the original ISO 26262 backbone.

The goal of this talk is to provide an overview of ISO PAS 8926 content and its connection with the current ISO 26262 second edition. Moreover, it will be the opportunity to introduce at a high-level the ISO 26262 initiatives related to the 3d edition and their planning.

As part of the ELISA Seminar series, Roberto Paccapeli, Functional Safety Manager at Red Hat, and Gabriele Paoloni, Sr. PE at Red Hat, gave a presentation titled, “ISO-PAS 8926 Overview and ISO 26262 3rd ed. Activity Planning.“

The ELISA Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend. You can watch all videos on the ELISA Project Youtube Channel ELISA Seminar Series Playlist here.

For more ELISA Project updates, subscribe to @ProjectElisa or our LinkedIn page or our Youtube Channel.

The current stage of space exploration has brought with it an increase in the complexity of systems deployed, in the number of players involved, and in the need for autonomy. This video describes two efforts taking place at NASA to help on that front. One the one hand, the use of runtime monitoring with Ogma and Copilot makes it possible to assure applications that are otherwise too costly to verify formally or test fully.

On the other hand, the use of Kaiaulu to process information about version control systems and issue trackers facilitates providing evidence of compliance with software engineering requirements, and to minimize deviations from the software plans. We believe that, together, they can enable more complex autonomous systems in space applications and shorten the time to that it takes systems to be put in production.

As part of the ELISA Seminar series, Ivan Perez Dominguez, Senior Research Scientist, KBR Inc at NASA Ames Research Center, gave a presentation titled, “The Road to Safe Space Exploration.“

The ELISA Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend. You can watch all videos on the ELISA Project Youtube Channel ELISA Seminar Series Playlist here.

For more ELISA Project updates, subscribe to @ProjectElisa or our LinkedIn page or our Youtube Channel.

Basil is a tool developed to support Software Specification analysis, testable requirements definition and coverage. It comes with a web user interface and also a simplified view of work item relationships. As per the complexity and non uniformity of toolchains used in the automotive field, and in general to support functional safety effort, Basil will also provide a rest web api and SPDX data import/export.

As part of the ELISA Seminar series, Luigi Pellecchia, Senior Software Quality Engineer at Red Hat, introduces “Basil: an open source tool for tracing requirements, code & tests.”

The ELISA Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend. You can watch all videos on the ELISA Project Youtube Channel ELISA Seminar Series Playlist here.For more ELISA Project updates, subscribe to @ProjectElisa or our LinkedIn page or our Youtube Channel.

The Xen Project is a static partitioning hypervisor for embedded, from aerospace to industrial and automotive. Xen enforces strong isolation between domains so that one cannot affect the execution of another. Features such as cache coloring reduce interference and improve interrupt latency and determinism. A real-time workload can run alongside a more complex guest. But can it be used in safety-critical environments?

The Xen hypervisor has a microkernel design: services and tools are non-essential and run in unprivileged VMs, while the core is less than 50K LOC. This architecture lends itself well to safety-critical applications as only the hypervisor core is critical and needs to go through the certification process.

As part of the ELISA Seminar Series, Stefano Stabellini, Fellow at AMD and Xen Hypervisor & Linux Kernel Maintainer, presented a video that describes the activities of the Xen FuSa SIG (Special Interest Group) to make Xen easier to safety-certify. It will highlight the most significant improvements introduced in the last 12 months to align Xen with safety standards such as DO-178C and ISO 26262. It will go into detail on MISRA C compliance, its latest status, and the next steps to close all the outstanding MISRA C gaps. It will discuss the role of Gitlab-CI and how to keep the Xen codebase MISRA C compliant without major efforts.

The Xen community has a clear path ahead to achieve the safety certification of the hypervisor. This talk will discuss it focusing on the most impactful changes to the Xen codebase and X en community processes.

The ELISA Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend. You can watch all videos on the ELISA Project Youtube Channel ELISA Seminar Series Playlist here.For more ELISA Project updates, subscribe to @ProjectElisa or our LinkedIn page or our Youtube Channel.

Creating a critical safe or secure system generally comes down to two aspects. The system has to be able to meet the technical expectations to handle its criticality and there needs to be evidence these expectations are actually met. With today’s software systems being built by integrating various software components, more often using open source than custom proprietary solutions, it’s obvious that having complete and reliable evidence that the software is created with criticality considerations, such as safety profiles, in mind is key.

Demonstrating the technical capabilities of a system to achieve the safety and security qualities can be done by established analysis methods. However, proving that its process provides the systematic evidence that all has been implemented, tested, built and configured as required, needs evidence of traceability from requirement to tests and release. Typically this evidence is locked within proprietary tools, never 100%, needing manual tasks to prove traceability between items. With continuous changes due to security updates or continuous deploys, managing this systematic evidence gets impossible.

As part of the ELISA Project Seminar Series, Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation, and Nicole Pappler, CTO and Founder of AlectoMetis, presented a webinar titled, “Automating Adherence to Safety Profiles After Fixing Vulnerabilities.” This video will present a model using SPDX, that allows for automated checks for integrity and availability of evidence to prove the systematic capability of software consumed by critical systems. Watch the full video below.

The ELISA Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA’s mission to define and maintain a common set of elements, processes and tools that can be incorporated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems amenable to safety certification. Speakers are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. Each seminar comprises a 45-minute presentation and a 15-minute Q&A, and it’s free to attend. You can watch all videos on the ELISA Project Youtube Channel ELISA Seminar Series Playlist here.

For more ELISA Project updates, subscribe to @ProjectElisa or our LinkedIn page or our Youtube Channel.

In March, the ELISA Project launched the Monthly Seminar Series, which focuses on hot topics related to ELISA and its mission. Presenters are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities.

For June, Khalid Aziz, Senior Software Engineer from Oracle, gave a presentation titled, “What is a page table and why should we care about it?” Physical memory on a computer is a shared resource. Kernel allocates and reclaims this shared resource to ensure all workloads on a system have adequate resources to complete their tasks. Accurate management of physical memory assignment is required for fairness and data safety. This is the task of Memory Management subsystem in the Linux kernel. We will discuss how the Memory Management subsystem assigns and tracks physical memory, how it ensures isolation between unrelated workloads and how it enables sharing of data in memory for workloads that need it. We will discuss the management overhead associated with isolation and dive deeper into  specific approaches on managing overhead for effective sharing.

The March seminar focused on the Real-time Linux Analysis Toolset. ELISA community member Daniel Bristot De Oliveira, Senior Principal Software Engineering at Red Hat, presented the tools provided by rtla. You can find out more or watch the video here.