Safety Critical Linux

By: Carsten Emde

Nicholas Mc Guire joins the OSADL team

Mission critical Tux

The next barrier to break

We are extremely glad to report that Professor Nicholas Mc Guire (aka "Der Herr Hofrat") has joined the OSADL team and has established a project to create a working group on Safety Critical Linux. Read more about this project here. You can reach Nicholas Mc Guire at OSADL in his function of the OSADL Safety Coordinator using this email address.

What is the rationale behind these activities?

There are many good reasons to use the Linux operating system in embedded systems. However, Linux did and does not provide everything that is needed for this purpose. One of the important issues is the real-time performance of the Linux kernel - but this has mostly been resolved with the advent of real-time extensions such as RTAI and Xenomai and with Ingo Molnar's and Thomas Gleixner's realtime-preempt patches. The remaining about 40% of the latter will probably be included in the mainline kernel until the end of the year. One of the next important issues is certification. Up to now, it is not impossible but rather expensive and time-consuming to undergo the certification procedure for a project that uses the Linux kernel under mission and safety critical conditions. The Safety Critical Linux working group led by Professor Mc Guire will provide the means to facilitate the certification procedure of the Linux kernel.

With the two issues, real-time performance and certification, solved, it is well conceivable that Linux will be used in more than 50% of the embeded systems worldwide by 2010.