Xen Project opened a shared safety-certification effort with AMD, EPAM and Renesas
The Linux Foundation launched a committee to maintain reusable functional-safety evidence for the Xen hypervisor, so integrators certifying it no longer each rebuild the same artifacts.
The Xen Project announced the Xen Safety Committee on August 17, a body that will develop and maintain shared engineering artifacts supporting functional-safety certification of the open-source hypervisor. The Linux Foundation, which hosts the project, said the initiative is aimed at automotive, industrial automation, avionics and robotics.
The committee’s work extends past maintaining source code. Founding contributors AMD, EPAM and Renesas have already built what the announcement described as an extensive set of software safety requirements, architecture specifications, MISRA-related engineering, DFMEA analysis, testing frameworks, tooling, code coverage and process documentation, and that material becomes the initiative’s starting point. Organizations pursuing their own certification programs draw on it rather than reproducing it.
Xen releases now carry five years of security coverage, of which three years are regular support followed by two years of security support. The project said the longer lifecycle gives integrators a more predictable foundation in industries with extended development, certification and deployment timelines. A new membership tier, Premier Plus, is aimed at organizations pursuing functional-safety certification; members help fund and maintain the safety program, appoint voting representatives to the Advisory Board and the Safety Committee, and gain access to committee-managed artifacts.
“Safety engineering has traditionally required every organization to recreate much of the same foundational work. We believe open source can change that,” said Cody Zuschlag, community manager at the Xen Project. Dan Cauchy, executive director of Automotive Grade Linux, described the initiative as a step toward shared artifacts that give automakers and suppliers greater confidence as they develop software-defined vehicles.
Why it matters: Certification evidence, not source code, is the expensive part of putting an open-source hypervisor in a safety-critical vehicle, and pooling it changes who can afford to try.
Source: The Linux Foundation