An interesting new website added to the family of NASA websites. code.NASA, according the website, NASA “…will continue, unify, and expand NASA’s open source activities. The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution.”
More information can be found at:
http://open.nasa.gov/blog/2012/01/04/the-plan-for-code/
I particularly like the call for participation – “Will your code someday escape our solar system or land on an alien planet? We’re working to make it happen, and with your help, it will.”
In his recent Embedded Computing Design article, Ben Brosgol discusses “Non-intrusive code coverage for safety-critical software” and more specifically how a “tool that derives precise source-level coverage metrics from execution trace data for a non-instrumented program” can really help with DO-178B evidence requirements. Abstract below with a link to the the full article…
Certification standards such as DO-178B for avionics require evidence that the system source code is completely exercised by tests derived from requirements. Traditional tools obtain the coverage data for a test run through code instrumentation, but this complicates analysis since the code being exercised is not the code that will finally execute. A solution to this problem is provided by a combination of two new tools, one for target emulation and one for coverage analysis. GNATemulator translates target object code into native host instructions, with the resulting code running on the host. This approach is efficient (target code is not being interpreted dynamically) and convenient (a significant amount of development can be conducted without an actual target board). Running on an instrumented version of GNATemulator, the GNATcoverage tool non-intrusively provides coverage data at both the source and object levels. At the object code level the tool performs instruction and branch coverage. At the source code level it provides statement coverage, decision coverage, and Modified Condition/Decision Coverage (MC/DC), performing the necessary analysis when MC/DC cannot be deduced from object branch coverage, and fully supports all levels of DO-178B safety certification.
An excellent interview in Military Embedded Systems this week looking at NASA’s drive towards open source software. Sharon Hess interviews Ray O’Brien, Chief Technology Officer for Information Technology at NASA Ames Research Center. In it, O’Brien discusses NASA’s OSS policy, projects, and the advantages they are seeing from interacting with the OSS community.
Below are the slides from the recent Couverture project conclusion meeting. Cyrille Comar presented the original needs and goals of the project, the challenges the team came across a long the way, and the main results.
At the upcoming Embedded World conference in Nuremberg, Germany, there will be a days conference on the use of freely-licensed open source software (FLOSS) to build safety-critical systems. Presentation topics include:
Validation of Linux for Safety-Related Systems
Linux as a real-time Hypervisor for the automotive industry
Efficient Safety Critical Systems Development – Is FLOSS the only answer?
Finding Misuses of Unsigned Integers in Linux Device Driver Code
“Open Proof” for Railway Safety Software A Potential Way-Out of Vendor Lock-in Advancing to Standardization, Transparency, and Software Security
Improved Redundancy and Consistency beyond RAID 1
Utilizing security methods of FLOSS GPOS for safety
In a paper first published in 2008, Christophe Bertrand and Christopher P. Fuhrman from the Department of Software and IT Engineering, ÉTS, Montreal, Canada, discuss how OpenUP (”a minimally sufficient software development process – meaning that only fundamental content is included”), could be adopted for use in the context of building high-integrity (DO-178B) software.
Abstract:
“Civil avionics software must be certified according to standards mandated by governmental agencies, such as the Federal Aviations Administration in the United States. Typically the certification is done in the context of the DO-178B standard. For companies seeking a first-time certification, preparation for DO-178B can be a daunting challenge. The documentation and planning of high-integrity software is therefore a software engineering problem. As a solution, we consider an open-source derivative of the Unified Process, called OpenUP, as a base process model from which to begin. Because of their importance in the DO-178B standard, software requirement activities are the focus of our study. We show that most of DO-178B’s objectives in this dimension could be supported with activities in OpenUP.”
Yesterday saw the official launch of the Hi-Lite project. Financially supported by French national and local government agencies, Hi-Lite aims to increase the use of formal methods in developing high integrity software, particularly to meet the forthcoming DO-178C avionics standard.
Hi-Lite is completely based on libre software. The project is structured in two different toolchains for Ada and C based on GNAT/GCC compilers, the SPARK verification toolset and the Frama-C platform. The integration of these toolchains inside two industrial IDEs offers to the user a common interaction on Ada and C programs. In particular, mixed Ada/C programs can be verified against a common specification.
The project partners are AdaCore, Altran Praxis, Astrium Space Transportation, CEA-LIST, the ProVal team of INRIA and Thales Communications. AdaCore is the project leader. For more information please visit www.open-do.org/projects/hi-lite and to subscribe to the public mailing list please send email to hi-lite-discuss@lists.forge.open-do.org.
We will be reporting on its progress here as it reaches major milestones throughout the evolution of the project.
We are pleased to welcome the HiberSource project to Open-DO. This configuration management system is used to manage project data in accordance with DO-178B and supports the full software life cycle.
There are many free version control systems (such as SVN) but there are no free configuration systems to support projects (like Razor or PVCS). HiberSource was started to be a configuration system to support full software life cycle with developing, verification and other certification activities.
For more information, please visit the project on the Open-DO forge.
Here’s the sixth and last in a series of videos shot at the recent “Lean, Agile Approach to High-Integrity Software” Event. In this talk, Roberto di Cosmo, Professor of Computer Science at the Paris Diderot, presents his observations and research on the realities and challenges of building open-source communities.
(Viewing tip: click the ‘HQ’ button on the video controller for better image quality, it helps a lot for the slides)
The talk is presented here is 4 parts.
Part 1 of 4
To view parts 2-4 of this talk click the ‘Read More’ link just below…
I attended the DASIA 2009 conference las week, and I discovered a really nice open-source initiative targeting the high-integrity real-time community. The Real-Time Systems Group of the University of Valencia has developed an open-source hypervisor (partitioning kernel) called XtratuM, which is not ARINC compliant, but it provides temporal and spatial partitioning. It currently works on x86 and LEON2.
I know personally the people behind this project, and I can encourage you to keep an eye on it.