Is Linux Kernel Development Good Enough to Make Your Life Depend on It? - Lukas Bulwahn, BMW Car IT
Channel: The Linux Foundation
Date: 25/10/2017

Is Linux Kernel Development Good Enough to Make Your Life Depend on It? -- Progress on Procedures & Methods to Qualify the Linux Kernel Development Process - Lukas Bulwahn, BMW Car IT GmbH

The OSADL SIL2LinuxMP project has been considering if Linux is adequate for use as safety element in safety-related systems. Lukas Bulwahn presents the project's results of the last two years of work.

In the presentation, he introduces intentions, standards and methods of functional safety. He describes how software that is not developed with safety in mind can be assessed, and the specific problem considering an operating system as element in safety-related systems. He presents the discovered solutions, hazard-driven decomposition and design, and assurance-driven selection, compared to traditional functional decomposition and selection. He shows methods to assess quality of the Linux kernel development process with surprising insights about the process, and calls the interested parties to engage and to fund activities that make this work product-ready and long-term maintainable.

About Lukas Bulwahn
Lukas Bulwahn has received a diploma in computer science and a PhD in formal methods from Technische Universität München. Since 2012, he is working at BMW Car IT GmbH on research and development of an open-source software platform for autonomous driving systems. As part of his research, he considers if Linux is sufficient for use as operating system for autonomous driving, which ultimately led to his participation in the OSADL SIL2LinuxMP project, where this question is answered in an industrial collaboration. He is interested in handling open-source compliance and developing open-source strategic decisions for businesses. As a small open-source project, he also develops and maintains meta-ros, the OpenEmbedded layer for ROS packages.