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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. '"
People don't kill people. Linux kills people.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The captain's name is James Kirk.
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.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
LynxOS is a proprietary Unix, compatible with Linux binaries.
It does not contain the Linux kernel and is closed source.
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Isn't there a provision in the license stating the software cannot be used for weapons purposes or something of the like?
No, and if there were then it would not be considered Open Source (clause 6 of the OSD, 'No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor').
Sorry, did you just ask what's the purpose of building ships when they can be sunk?
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Linux doesn't kill people, Windows NT kills people!
(Or at least it kills ships... got to watch out for those divide by zero errors!)
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
It's primarily fire support for marine assaults. During the Gulf War, the last battleships left in service, the Iowa class, served in a fire support and artillery role for shore based forces. This proved to be very effective, as the Mark 7 16" guns delivered a lot of firepower faster and cheaper than missiles and could do it pretty quickly, and redirect said fire more quickly than it took to program a firing solution into the cruise missiles.
However, we retired the battleships as they were ancient relics. In addition, they had limited range; the Mark 7s could fire about 38 kms. Current naval fire support is done through the 5" Mark 45 guns on the DDG51s, but those have even less range (about 20 or so kms) and deliver smaller payloads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Gun_System
The Zumwalt is designed around this weapon system. It fires 10 rounds per minute, using a 155mm shell which is the same shell used by land based artillery. It has a range of 100+ kms and is accurate to 50 meters. This would significantly extend the capabilities of shore based operations. The stealth isn't so much for defense as for offense; if the enemy is aware of the ship they'll move out of the area. So effectively this destroyer is a stealthy highly mobile long range artillery platform.