Tux Enlisted for U.S. Defense Program

An anonymous reader writes "Linux is a key part of the Army's massive $200B FCS (Future Computing System) initiative, it seems. RTOS vendor LynuxWorks was chosen to provide the OS for 18 weapons platforms under development, because its LynxOS-178 real-time OS can run Linux binaries -- including the "common operating environment" that Boeing is developing for FCS."

Comments

Re:Yay, no BSOD

[hey!]

Well, BSODs are pretty much a thing of the past, at least unless you have a defective hardware.

That said, when Windows is used where formerly an embedded OS is used, there is a tendency not to do a very good job stripping out all the stuff that's not needed. Since you aren't going to be patching things that much in the field, this could lead to known security holes on deployed systems for a long time. It may not matter, indeed usually the excuse is that it won't matter, but sometimes the unforseen happens. It's not unheard of for "embedded" versions of windows to have problems like windows file sharing turned on. The hardware engineers don't think like sysadmins.

This problem is not intrinsic to Windows; I've seen the same thing recently on a box that controlled an under vehicle scanner. It used stock SUSE with an old verison of BIND and samba, trhe3 works. The customer wanted to connect it via wireless to a central guard station. This was a bad idea. The security holes in the box are harmless as long as it is stand alone, but on a network they are huge liabilities.

At least with Linux, you can go the Linux from scratch route, which minimizes you exposure to security holes in ancient software.