Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference + OSPOCon 2021

Over the last years, many discussions took place in Linux Foundation's ELISA working groups (elisa.tech) about possible approaches to qualify Linux for safety-critical systems. To achieve this goal, an architectural description of the Linux kernel is required. The challenge though is to find the adequate granularity for description: It must be precise enough to support safety analyses, but it cannot be too fine-grained to the point of being unmanageable. A promising approach is to leverage the ISO26262-6 and ISO26262-8 together, in a hierarchical incremental approach. Optimizing the amount of produced documentation and collaterals. In this session, the foundations of this approach will be presented. It will be discussed why this approach is suitable for safety application as well as out-of-context using assuming safety requirements and why it provides natural scalability across different use-cases. Finally, considerations will be made with respect to available tools and mechanisms already implemented or proposed in Linux that can significantly help with the above-mentioned approach. Including a detailed discussion about how to cross verify, and monitor, the documentation and the kernel using the Runtime Verification subsystem ( https://lwn.net/Articles/857862/).