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Seminar Series

Xen Safety Certification: progress so far and plans for the future (video)

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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.

Automating Adherence to Safety Profiles After Fixing Vulnerabilities (Video)

By Blog, Seminar Series

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.

A Development Environment for DO-178C Level D Certified Linux

By Blog, Seminar Series

The ELISA Project Seminar Series focuses on hot topics related to ELISA and its mission. Presenters are members, contributors and thought leaders from the ELISA Project and surrounding communities. To view past presentations, click here.

On July 18,  Chuck Wolber, Software Engineer at The Boeing Company presented a seminar titled, “A Development Environment for DO-178C Level D Certified Linux.”

This video features the use of Yocto/OpenEmbedded as a tool for managing a distributed development environment, automated build and test, and ultimately delivering a DO-178C level D certified Linux platform into revenue service. It also touches on generalized aspects of traceability, team dynamics, “day one developer,” and extensibility. Watch the video:

Learn more about linux and aerospace by joining the ELISA Aerospace Working Group.

For all upcoming ELISA Working Group meetings and public seminars, please go to https://lists.elisa.tech/calendar.

ELISA Seminar: PREEMPT_RT – How not to break it (Video)

By Blog, Seminar Series

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. You can find all of the seminar videos here.

In October, Sebastian Siewior from Linutronix presented a seminar titled,  PREEMPT_RT – how not to break it.

The PREEMPT_RT patch set has only a handful patches left until it can be enabled on the X86 Architecture at the time of writing. The work has not finished once the patches are fully merged. A new issue is how to not break parts of PREEMPT_RT in future development by making assumption which are not compatible or lead to large latencies. Another problem is how to address limitations on PREEMPT_RT like the big softirq/ bottom halves lock which can lead to high latencies.

A short background of the RTL Collaborative Project: The Real Time Linux collaborative project was established to help coordinate the efforts around mainlining Preempt RT and ensuring that the maintainers have the ability to continue development work, long-term support and future research of RT. In coordination with the broader community, the workgroup aims to encourage broader adoption of RT, improve testing automation and documentation and better prioritize the development roadmap.

Would like to know more on how it’s all started? You can find more details here: https://wiki.linuxfoundation.org/realtime/rtl/start.

Watch the full video here:

Materials from the seminar can be found here.

Learn more about ELISA Project.

What is a page table and why should we care about it?(Video)

By Blog, Seminar Series

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.

Real-time Linux Analysis Toolset (Video)

By Blog, Seminar Series

On Wednesday, March 16, the ELISA Project  officially launched its 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.

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, present the tools provided by rtla.

From 5.17, Linux 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. But instead of testing Linux as a black box, rtla leverages kernel tracing capabilities to provide precise
information about the properties and root causes of unexpected results.

In this video, Daniel presents two tools provided by rtla. The timerlat tool used to measure IRQ and thread latency for interrupt-driven applications (important for the PREEMPT_RT kernel), and the osnoise tool used to evaluate the ability of Linux to isolate, from the scheduling perspective, a workload from
the interferences from the rest of the system. The presentation also includes examples of using the tool to find the root cause of unexpected latencies and how to collect extra tracing information directly from the tool.

Stay tuned for more details about the next seminar. Until then, check out the schedule and register for the ELISA Spring Workshop, hosted online on April 5-7. Register here for free: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/elisa-workshop-spring/.