Standards: They Are Just The Start
At Lynx, we see the support of standards for mission critical systems as just the start. That is because APIs don’t define system behavior and...
2 min read
Ian Ferguson | VP Marketing
:
Nov 20, 2020 11:50:13 AM
Earlier in November I was speaking as part of a track on cybersecurity at (Virtual) Electronica, a tradeshow held every two years in Munich. One of the questions related to when open source hypervisors will appear at the heart of mission critical systems. Mission critical systems are those that simply have to work all the time in a predictable way. Relevant applications include avionics, rail infrastructure, self- driving vehicles.
Almost every popular open source hypervisor (E.g. Xen, KVM, seL4) has been used to demonstrate the ability to host virtual security appliances, facilitate secure software updates, and partition system designs to reduce attack vectors compared to operating system (OS)-based designs.
At a high-level, the ability to partition hardware and software, and provide virtual networking, has become a commoditized property afforded by hypervisors. From our discussions with customers and, indeed, institutions like the US Army, fundamental gaps are revealed which must be addressed in order to realize the vision of autonomous mission systems. Primarily they fit into three main themes;
These are the areas where we focus the LYNX MOSA.ic framework, on which we construct a number of specific-to-application products for Avionics, UAVs/Satellites and Industrial markets.
Open source has clearly made great inroads into a diverse range of applications. We see open source used in avionics platforms, but sand boxed to implement specific system features that are unrelated to the must work all of the time in a predictable way functionality. I think we will see increasing adoption of open source in the long term and will need a software company to implement a business model analogous to what RedHat has done to drive Linux adoption across Enterprises.
If you want to know more about what Lynx discussed at Virtual Electronica, read this piece here.
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