USS Zumwalt — a Guided Missile Destroyer Running On Linux

New submitter SanDogWeps writes "Sean Gallagher over at Ars Technica reports that when the U.S.S. Zumwalt (DDG 1000) puts to sea later this year, it will be different from any other ship in the Navy's fleet in many ways. The $3.5 billion ship is designed for stealth, survivability, and firepower, and it's packed with advanced technology. And at the heart of its operations is a virtual data center powered by off-the-shelf server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and over 6 million lines of software code. From the article: 'Called the Common Display System, or CDS (pronounced as "keds" by those who work with it), the three-screen workstations in the operations center are powered by a collection of quad-processor Intel motherboards in an armored case, which gives new meaning to the nautical phrase "toe buster." Even the commanding officer's and executive officer's chairs on the bridge have CDS workstations built-in. Each CDS system runs multiple LynxOS-based Linux virtual machines, which can run on various networks partitioned by security level and purpose. '"

Comments

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we supposed to be happy that the blood, sweat and tears of the thousands of developers who gave their time to an ideal of free software are now being used by the world's favorite rogue state to bring death and destruction to far flung corners of the globe?

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, when you signed on to open source you agreed you had no control over what it ended up being used for. Stallman's rage could probably power a small city though.

Re:And?

[n1ywb]

Animals fight. Humans fight. It's stupd and sad and I hope we can move long term away from it. In the meantime, I for one am happy we have a strong defense. Do you honestly think Russia and China aren't interested in global hegemony?

That said, I'm not so happy about our offensive game.

Anyway freedom is a double edged sword. Nobody gets to pick and choose who uses FOSS for what purpose. That's sort of the point. You honestly don't think Linux has played a military roll before?

On the other hand they may contribute back to the community, and probably already have done so.

And it's a hell of a lot better than them running Windows. You'd be amazed how many mission critical Windows boxes are on a typical ship, to say nothing of a military vessel.

Re:And?

[tnk1]

Fire has been used by humans for 1.9 million years or so. It is very useful for killing people painfully. I'm still pretty happy with fire.

Linux has been used from the early nineties, and now its going to kill people. I'm still pretty happy with Linux.

Granted, I'm not going to brag about that aspect, but I wouldn't go so far to say it is a ghastly aspect. Modern militaries use everything from brooms to paperclips in support of their mission to kill stuff. That's because militaries use systems to accomplish their tasks, just like everything else does. If you create a system to move food around the globe, you also create a system that moves food between war zones.

I'd be proud that Linux is deemed capable of underlying a mission critical system, even if I don't like the results of said system.

Re:And?

[Anonymous Coward]

You had me until the last sentence.

War isn't profitable? Sure, it isn't profitable for you and me. But it's highly profitable for the military industrial complex and for the state.

Re:Resistant to anti-ship missles?

[Antipater]

a) I doubt anyone outside of classified weapons research actually knows whether offense or defense currently has the advantage.
b) The Zumwalt is a guided missile destroyer, which means that it will be the thing launching said anti-ship missiles at the other side's ships. It doesn't matter how deadly the enemy is, if you take them out before they take you out.