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Adhering to functional safety standards is costly and time consuming. For an application to be compliant with the most demanding SIL (IEC 61508), ASIL (ISO 26262), Class (IEC 62304), or DAL (DO-178) in industrial, automotive, medical or avionics applications...
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Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) virtualizes network interface cards (NICs) to allow a single NIC to present itself as dozens of virtual NICs to a hypervisor. It is a hardware standard, part of the PCI-SIG (Peripheral Component Interconnect - Special...
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The standard benefits of a hypervisor are well known and often touted. Every RTOS has its hypervisor and they do genuinely help embedded designers to:
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Industry 4.0? Edge computing? Call it what you will, the fact remains that our industry moves slowly. Obstacles must be overcome before we can claim that edge computing has evolved from theories and experiments to true industrial deployment. The resolution of the...
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There are substantial challenges in building secure and safe systems on multicore processors (MCPs). Last level cache contention is undoubtedly the largest source of multicore interference, and a significant challenge for real-time systems. Here we discuss a...
The term “architecture” seems to be in ever increasing use in its technological context. As an extrapolation from the construction term that Frank Lloyd Wright would have been familiar with, its definition as the “overall design of a computing...
Over the years I’ve read lots of datasheets. They can sometimes be heavy on marketing buzzwords and prone to sweeping statements that oversell their solutions and gloss over gaps. I read this new Solution Brief from Intel and it stopped me in my tracks. This...
Anyone who travels with a laptop soon develops a bittersweet relationship with international power adaptor plugs. Sure, they turn your homeland plug into something that approximates to what’s needed. But we’re all too familiar with the questionable connections, the weight that...
Choosing an RTOS, regardless of the cost, involves many considerations, including accommodating your specific hardware architecture, the scalability of the RTOS, response requirements, peripheral support, scheduler, services, libraries, middleware, graphical tools,...
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At the time of writing, no multicore safety critical software systems exist. That is, no system that utilizes a multi-core processor to execute multiple applications in parallel has been certified for flight by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the US...
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Lynx Software Technologies has built and supported real-time operating systems (RTOSes) since 1988. We have witnessed hardware and embedded software technologies evolve and have supported our customers through the design, development, integration, certification,...
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Having built both separation kernels and real-time operating systems—and supported customers using both across a wide range of industries—we are familiar with the pros and cons of each software technology, as well as their security, safety, reliability, and...
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Lynx exhibited at the 28th annual Safety-Critical Systems Symposium on February 11th to 13th 2020 in York, United Kingdom. The SSS is hosted by the UK Safety-Critical Systems Club, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to raise awareness and facilitate...
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I hadn't heard of "bottom up" avionics certification before I read FAA's TC-16/51. But now, looking back at it, I think the authors from Thales Avionics, including Xavier Jean, PhD, proposed a big change in perspective. In their own words, here's their...
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Linux is ubiquitous. It runs most internet servers, inside Android* smartphones, and is used on millions of embedded systems that, in the past, ran Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes). Linux can (and should) be used were possible for embedded...
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The most formidable challenges of modern avionics development programs are often centered around the safety certification process and the corresponding requirements and costs. Equally as challenging to any large development program are the design and...
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Overarching Properties—an alternative design assurance approach to DO-178C—marks the biggest change in airborne software safety certification since DO-178B was unveiled in 1992. Intended to be more efficient and flexible than DO-178C, the approach was introduced...
Lynx Software Technologies has built and supported real-time operating systems (RTOSes) since 1988. We have witnessed hardware and embedded software technologies evolve and have supported our customers through the design, development, integration, certification,...
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Do Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOSes) consistently provide the most effective platform for realizing your embedded software system design? Most RTOS vendors seem to think so, frequently citing RTOS benefits while rarely discussing the disadvantages. Too...
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Lynx participated in this year’s Arm TechCon with a booth in the expo hall, where we demoed Lynx MOSA.ic and its components — LynxSecure®, Buildroot Linux, LynxOS-178®, and Lynx Simple Applications (which are bare-metal apps). It was great to see people walk...
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Choosing an RTOS is not as simple as choosing a car. We know about cars; we know their strengths and weaknesses and we intuitively understand compromises like performance vs practicality or luxury vs price. We see all kinds of vehicles on the road, so the range...
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Lynx Software Technologies has built and supported real-time operating systems (RTOSes) since 1988. We have witnessed hardware and embedded software technologies evolve and have supported our customers through the design, development, integration,...
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The complexity of today’s automobiles is increasing with every new model on the market. A modern car can contain hundreds of electronic control units and with connectivity and autonomy becoming commonplace, this is increasing dramatically as we enter the 2020s. ...
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Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) is the complex name for a technology beginning to find its way into embedded devices. SR-IOV is a hardware standard that allows a PCI Express device – typically a network interface card (NIC) – to present itself as...
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This week saw LYNX’s cache partitioning feature for Lynx MOSA.ic™ demonstrated for the first time at the Collins Aerospace Embedded Computing Conference in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Cache partitioning is a new feature of Lynx MOSA.ic™ released in September 2019 and...
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The board support package (BSP) is the glue software that allows an embedded real-time operating system (RTOS) to run on a specific target board. Creating a BSP for your chosen board is a detailed software engineering task that takes 2 to 8 weeks. ...
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Last week I was able to spend several days at the Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Technical Interchange Meeting (TIM) and consortium meetings. For those who are not familiar with either the Open Group or FACE™, the Open Group is a...
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Lynx Software Technologies is committed to open standards. POSIX®—an open standard based on UNIX operating systems and their APIs—brings a powerful set of features and capabilities to the table for embedded application development, resulting in benefits to...
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A DO-178B/C Reusable Software Component (RSC) is a software collection that is recognized as meeting the requirements of RTCA/DO-178B/C and that may be used on more than one project without having to regenerate certification artifacts.
The FAA grants RSC...
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CAST-32A presents the coordinated position of avionics certification authorities regarding Multi-Core Processors (MCPs). While today’s aerospace ecosystem could benefit from the use of MCPs, before CAST-32A was published, FAA/EASA had not yet devised a means to...
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Meltdown and Spectre provide insight into building more resilient systems. Less covered in the press than the vulnerabilities themselves, problems with patching, or “timelines to discovery” is that some systems were, in fact, prepared and protected— requiring no...
