ELISA

ELISA Seminar - AvioNix: Infrastructure as Code for Linux in Avionics
2026-06-23 07:00 - 08:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
ELISA Project 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.
Title: AvioNix: Infrastructure as Code for Linux in Avionics
Date: Tuesday, June 23, 2026, 7:00-8:00 Pacific / 14:00-15:00 UTC / 16:00 – 17:00 CET
Speaker: Wanja Zaeske, Research Scientist, German Aerospace Center; Erin Vanderveen, Sr. Specialist Functional Engineer, Tweag by Modus Create
How to Attend: Register here in advance to attend for free. And please add the webinar joining details to your calendar from the confirmation email you will receive upon registering
Description:
Efforts to bring Linux into safety-critical applications in the aviation domain must tackle the problem of pluralistic software release and distribution methods. The diversity of open source, compared to COTS walled-garden safety-critical operating systems, brings unique challenges, such as avoiding lengthy “getting started” sections, resolving “works on my machine” issues for users, and maintaining robust SBOM tracking.
Nix promises to solve these issues. This seminar provides a brief overview of Nix as technology, NixOS as a Linux distribution based on it, and the practical use of ELISA Aerospace-WG’s AvioNix demonstrator.

ELISA Seminar - WHAT-WHY-HOW: A practical model for understanding software requirements
2026-07-23 07:00 - 08:00
ELISA Project 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.
Title: WHAT-WHY-HOW: A practical model for understanding software requirements
Date: Thursday, July 23, 2026, 7:00-8:00 Pacific / 14:00-15:00 UTC / 16:00 – 17:00 CET
Speaker:

Stanislav Pankevich, Lead Software Engineer at Reflex Aerospace GmbH
How to Attend: Register here in advance to attend for free. And please add the webinar joining details to your calendar from the confirmation email you will receive upon registering

Description:
Software engineering discussions often blur intent, requirements, design, and implementation, reducing clarity and weakening traceability. This webinar introduces a simple but rigorous model, “What-Why-How”, for separating these concerns across the development lifecycle.
Starting from core systems engineering concepts such as users, needs, problems, solutions, systems, and environments, the session frames development as a progression from the problem space to requirements (contract) and then to the solution space. It explains how WHY (user needs), WHAT (formal requirements), HOW (design and implementation), and interface (system boundary) relate, and why mixing them leads to ambiguity.
One key property of the WHAT-WHY-HOW model is its recursive structure: at each level of abstraction, the WHAT-WHY of the next level becomes the HOW of the previous one. Recognizing this recursion helps maintain conceptual clarity, particularly in large, multi-tier projects involving multiple stakeholders and suppliers.
Through practical examples and heuristics, the webinar shows how to distinguish requirements from design, avoid mixed statements in technical writing, define minimal traceable requirements (identifier, statement, rationale), and apply the model consistently across documentation, code, testing, and reviews.
The approach is lightweight and broadly applicable, from system architecture to everyday engineering work. The session is suitable both as an introduction and as a refresher for engineers working with requirements and software systems.

Open Source Summit 2026 - Seoul, Korea
2026-08-11 - 2026-08-12
Open Source Summit is the premier event for open source developers and contributors. It’s where maintainers, technologists, and community leaders come together to share knowledge, collaborate on solutions, and push open source projects forward. It’s the home for code, community, and the people driving the future of open source.
Open Source Summit is not a single-focus, niche event—it’s the big tent that unites the full spectrum of open source technologies and communities. Whether you work in cloud infrastructure, Linux kernel development, AI/ML, embedded systems, DevOps, security, or safety-critical systems, Open Source Summit offers a shared space to exchange ideas, make connections, and learn across domains. It’s where technologists who don’t typically land in the same room get a chance to collaborate.
At the same time, Open Source Summit brings in the leaders and practitioners who support the ecosystem from non-technical angles: open source program office (OSPO) staff, legal experts, policy advocates, standards organizations, equity champions, community managers, and foundation leaders. Together, they help shape the frameworks, culture, and strategy that make open source work.
This event serves as a strategic checkpoint for the open source movement. It’s where conversations happen about not only what’s being built—but how and why. From sustainability and funding models to licensing, AI alignment, security, and governance, Open Source Summit brings clarity and direction to a fast-changing open source landscape.
Whether you’re deep in code or focused on enabling the communities and structures that support it, this is where your work gains momentum and impact.
ELISA Project will be part of the Safety Critical Software Track. This track explores the intersection of open source and safety standards, covering best practices for regulatory compliance, security updates, and safety engineering. Sessions will delve into requirements traceability, quality assessments, safety analysis methodologies, and technical development for safety-critical systems.
Don’t forget to add these sessions to your schedule!
Tuesday August 11, 2026 11:00 – 11:30 KST – Sponsored Session: A New Security Standard for the AI Era: Zero-CVE and Real-Time Threat Response – SeungEll Lee, Red Hat
As Generative AI and Agentic AI continue to evolve, cyberattacks have become increasingly automated. With hundreds of new CVEs disclosed every day and AI-powered attacks are automated in zero-hour, traditional security and patch management approaches have reached their limits.
This session explores how organizations can build a lightweight hardened infrastructure and a trusted Zero-CVE environment with Red Hat AI on a proven platform that leverages the strengths of the open source ecosystem. It also examines the need for autonomous defense systems and approaches to implementing them, enabling real-time threat response while maintaining infrastructure stability through controlled AI-driven automation.
Wednesday August 12, 2026 15:55 – 16:25 KST – Case Studies of Existing Use of Linux in Safety-critical Domains – Nikita Verma, Individual & Harshita Varma, Independent
The automotive transition to Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) relies on mixed-criticality architectures, consolidating open-source infotainment (Automotive Grade Linux) alongside safety-critical Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS). This virtualization boundary—often KVM/Xen—is assumed to be a secure airgap. However, guest-to-host communication requires hardware abstraction, primarily via the VirtIO standard.
This 40-minute session conducts a hardcore technical teardown of the virtqueue shared-memory mechanism, exposing how legacy C-based VirtIO backends (vhost-net) introduce critical vulnerabilities into the automotive supply chain.
We will dissect a hypervisor escape utilizing custom fuzzing. By crafting malformed descriptor chains to bypass frontend validation, a compromised guest can force the host’s backend into out-of-bounds memory corruption, effectively bridging the airgap into the control plane.
Finally, we will architect the open-source defense: migrating to memory-safe rust-vmm virtualization components to mathematically eliminate buffer overflows, and deploying zero-overhead eBPF probes for kernel-level I/O anomaly detection.
Wednesday August 12, 2026 16:35 – 17:05 KST – Using AI To Bridge the Gap Between Safety Standards and Open Source Development – Kate Stewart, The Linux Foundation
Popular open source operating systems like the Linux Kernel and Zephyr RTOS accept up to 9 commits per hour. Safety standards, like 61508, 26262, and others were developed without this rate of change in mind. Safety standards also expect the requirements to be explicit, which is not part of OS development processes. By using AI tools, we’re able to accelerate the analysis of OS code to derive the requirements and traceability to tests. By storing this info in tools that can import and export System Package Data eXchange (SPDX) 3.0+, we’re able to capture the requirements in a way that can be leveraged for wider system analysis necessary for safety. Associating integrity methods with the requirements and code snippets, also enables monitoring. Combining requirements traceability with precise build SBOM metadata, gives us a framework to keep a component compliant to a safety profile after a security fix.
This talk will provide a view on the latest experiments occurring with the Linux Kernel in the ELISA project, as well as in the Zephyr Safety Working group, and SPDX Functional Safety working group to extend SPDX to meet the needs of establishing these frameworks.
Learn more about the event and register here.

ELISA Project at Linux Plumbers Conference 2026: Safe Systems with Linux MC
2026-10-05 - 2026-10-07
The ELISA Project will be part of the Safe Systems with Linux Microconference at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2026, taking place October 5–7 at the Prague Congress Centre in Prague, Czechia, with hybrid participation available.
As Linux continues to be used in systems with varying levels of criticality, the need for clear traceability between requirements, code, and tests is becoming increasingly important. The Safe Systems with Linux MC will focus on how the Linux kernel ecosystem can better support structured requirements, documentation, testing, and artifact sharing while preserving the speed and flexibility of upstream development.
Building on discussions from previous years, this year’s microconference will explore approaches for expressing requirements and traceability as sidecar data structures. This makes the information more machine-readable, maintainable, and scalable without requiring kernel design documentation to live directly in the code.
Topics will include technical debt reduction, requirements-driven testing, semantic aspects of kernel requirements, progress on the Linux Kernel Requirements Framework, practical implementation challenges, automation tooling, connections with kernel quality initiatives, industry adoption, and the role of requirements as an education and onboarding tool.
The session aims to bring together kernel maintainers, developers, safety architects, tooling experts, and industry stakeholders to discuss how structured requirements and traceability practices can complement existing Linux kernel development workflows and support the creation of dependable, safety-relevant systems with Linux. Learn more.

Embedded Linux Conference & Open Source Summit Europe 2026
2026-10-07 - 2026-10-09
Open Source Summit is the premier event for open source developers and contributors. It’s where maintainers, technologists, and community leaders come together to share knowledge, collaborate on solutions, and push open source projects forward. It’s the home for code, community, and the people driving the future of open source.
The ELISA Project encourages submissions for Open Source Summit Europe 2026 across a broad range of topics related to safety-critical and embedded Linux systems.
Suggested topics for Open Source Summit Europe 2026 include safety-critical software, the interaction between open source software and safety standards, best practices for working with regulatory authorities, security updates for safety-critical systems, safety engineering in open source projects, quality assessments based on development data, requirements traceability and testability, development of safety-relevant technical features, safety analysis methodologies, and real-world case studies showcasing Linux in safety-critical domains such as aerospace, automotive, industrial, medical, and energy systems.
Learn more about the suggested tracks and suggested topics here.
Important dates to remember:

CFP Closes: Wednesday, 24 June at 23:59 CEST (UTC +2) / 14:59 PDT (UTC -7)
CFP Notifications: Friday, 24 July
Schedule Announcement: Wednesday, 29 July
Event Dates: Wednesday, 7 October – Friday, 9 October

Learn more about the Open Source Summit Europe conference here.
