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US Military Drones Migrating To Linux
DeviceGuru (1136715) writes "Raytheon is switching its UAV control system from Solaris to Linux for U.S. military drones, starting with a Northrop Grumman MQ-8C Fire Scout helicopter. Earlier this month Raytheon entered into a $15.8 million contract with the U.S. Navy to upgrade Raytheon's control systems for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), according to a recent Avionics Intelligence report. The overhaul is designed to implement more modern controls to help ground-based personnel control UAVs. Raytheon's tuxified version of its Vertical Takeoff and Landing Unmanned Air Vehicle Tactical Control System (TCS) will also implement universal UAV control qualities. As a result the TCS can be used in in all U.S. Navy, Air Force, Army, and Marine Corps UAVs that weigh at least 20 pounds. By providing an open standard, the common Linux-based platform is expected to reduce costs by limiting the types of UAV control systems that need to be built and maintained for each craft."
NO CARRIER
free to use unless you intend to kill people.
This comment is covered by the Popeye standard disclaimer.
Can't you just feel it?
To see the mascot!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
When can we expect the hellfire driver to make its way in-tree?
You mean free software is free to everyone who can use it?!!
n/t
or kill you for that matter...
Do they use systemd or upstart?
Red Hat Military Edition? Killbuntu? Debian For Drones?
Finding God in a Dog
Imagine what Slashdot in 1999 would have made of the headline "US Military Drones Migrating To Linux".
Why is Windows not an option?
The killer app for linux has been finally released. This will be the year of the linux desktop, or at least the one when it will take off.
Than some system that can be taken over by the enemy ...
If Larry has anything to do with it, Oracle will still be there somehow.
Because Linux the drones never crash and so will never ever kill anyone anymore.
As far as I can tell from reading the report, Linux is not installed on the drones themselves, but is running under the operations control suite. They would be absolutely insane not to be running an RTOS on the avionics of the drones. I do research on drones (no, not the $100 quadcopters you can buy from Toys R' Us) and autopilots, and wouldn't let Linux anywhere near the avionics.
My laughter was so hard I was tearing up. I had to get a washcloth!
Who knew little Tux could be so mean when angry?
This reminds me of a story that one of my engineering lecturers told us.
He was working for a company that was developing code for a washing machine. The company had bought up a pile of excess micros from a military supplier
and they could not get the code to work properly, they eventually traced it back to the fact the micro did not obey the RTI instruction (return from interrupt).
On enquiry they were told that particular interrupt was used to make the missile go "Boom" so
1) there was no point, there was nothing to return to
2) its was a "security feature", once they wanting the missile to go "Boom" they did NOT want anything (hardware/software bug) or anyone (hackers) to change its mind.
I heard the total cost of ownership for Linux system is shit.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Windows 2000
I'm still waiting for it to be on their orbiting brain lasers.
I vaguely remember that Kermit had a prohibition on military use back in the 1980s; maybe longer. That seems to have gone away. No sure if it's because Kermit is no longer controlled by Columbia University.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Wow, didn't know US drones were migratory.
sed and awk
Interesting how Linux is ending up everywhere - except for the desktop.
killall -9 "myenemies"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Until they found that it had gotten infected with a virus...
As I understand it, it was still a benign virus - but it illustrated the lack of security available, even on a presumably standalone system.
I would have guessed FreeBSD, as the logo might be more appropriate.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Maybe not knives as they have other utility but certainly the case could be made for guns. They have only one purpose. Hitting either a living or non-living target.
And what is wrong with hitting a non-living target? Target shooting is a sport. Its even a part of the Olympics.
As far as a living target goes, if its hunting and the hunter is going to eat the meat I don't see much problem unless you are a vegetarian. Those of us who pay Ronald McDonald to hit a cow on the head with a hammer in order to make us a burger are not really in a position to criticize the hunter that sees his meat go to good use.
Yes, Linux is still a long way away from becoming prominent in that one particular area, but it certainly isn't having any trouble taking over everything else in the meantime. Every OS vendor is looking out their window and finding themselves surrounded by penguins.
Even the GPL covers this. You can argue that a shell shot by the drone is like a linked library to the drone. Therefore the victim has to see the GPL before being killed.
People so frequently misunderstand the GPL. There is no obligation to provide source unless someone has the binary, and the publisher can wait until they ask. So to be GPL compliant the publisher only has to provide source to strike survivors if and when they ask. The publisher is also free to choose their own delivery mechanism so long as it is something commonly used, given the precedent of the first shell a second shell containing source would be compliant.
This is, technically, a no-brainer. When I was in university, I had to write programs that included a server and four clients with each client running on a separate computer and the server also running on one of the client machines. They then played a game of 'pong' around 4 monitors (each connected to the 4 client machines) and 1 big 4-monitor virtual desktop. I used Linux at home. So I wrote the networking software on Linux, then had to port it to Solaris. I added the compiler directives at the top of the source code giving directions to compile in Linux or Solaris. I got extra marks for making the software (somewhat) cross-platform compatible. But in truth, the difference was a slightly different path for libraries, everything else was the same. Linux is also used on a lot of US military gear already. The Navy is against running windows since it left one of their ships literally dead in the water. You can read about it here . Windows has a very short, one-off relationship with command and control systems. Linux owns this space.
Maybe hackers can program it so that any coordinates given to it, cause it to fly to Seatle.
...like that time I met a guy running a telemarketing company on Asterisk :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Linux skipped straight past the desktop and went to were all the real action is: KILLER DRONES
Open Source users, particularly the most zealous GPL3-sort, are always going on about "freedom" for the user (and often even attacking BSD licensing over matters of "purity") but in the end, you guys are no different from Microsoft or the NSA: you want CONTROL. Your're apparently all for "freedom" to have users do what YOU want/approve but you oppose them having the freedom to use "free software" in ways you do not like. You want to pretend that get to control how the code you write is used AFTER you release it to others, but you overlook that nobody else gets such rights. Does the guy who makes steel get to say it cannot be used in bombs or warship hulls? And while we're at it, do you accept moral responsibility if the code is NOT used, and therefore a system is NOT available to save some innocent people in some truly horrific situation someday?
As somebody who has, in fact, embedded Linux into a weapons system, allow me to point out the following: weapons are just like any other tool. Whether they are used for good or for ill is a matter of the human USER. The "drone" you do not like to see Obama use to put another check on his "kill list" today is also the drone that may be used someday to stop an evil local "warlord" from killing a bunch of women and children in a village. Yes, a weapon CAN be used to destroy a target that some politician wants to destroy for bad reasons, but the very same drone can deter some very bad things as well. Nuclear submarines are an excellent example of this: they COULD be used to end the world, but in truth they've been used for 50 years to deter another World War (something tech circa 1900 failed to do - TWICE). In fact, no US nuclear sub (nor even Soviet/Russian I think) has even launched a ballistic missile in anger, nor even sunk a surface ship in anger, if I recall correctly. Oh, and please don't even START with accusations about blowing up people at weddings; in wars where one side wears civilian clothes and hides behind civilians, it's become a tactic to pretend that every large gathering that is bombed by non-Muslims is "a wedding" and that all the dead and wounded were innocents. You have to be REALLY dense to think that the US, armed with all the overhead imaging we have, somehow just keeps bombing all the wedding parties in the middle east.
I sleep perfectly well at night. The tech I have worked on sometimes is used to kill, but always in a directed way, and aimed at somebody the user presumably has made an effort to determine is "bad". The guys in the automobile industry? Not so much; THERE is where you should worry ... those products kill tens of thousands of people every year, nearly all are randomly-selected for death or maiming, a HUGE number are innocent women and small children, and almost NONE are combatants.
There are and were many benefits to running military applications on Sparc, RS6000, and PA style chips. Primarily that if your enemy gets the code they can't do shit with it. Not just that, but the chips tended to be higher quality and better shielded from influence. Not that our politicians seem to care any more mind you, but many military people still do.
So now we have Drone code running on cheap commodity chips and an OS that bad guys run too. It may save a few dollars (studies indicate very few mind you, work in defense and you will see) at the expense of giving enemies a chance to rebuild a drone. Before you "but but but.." that comment away, Iran has at least 2 of our most powerful drones in their possession and undamaged.
Sad times we are living in, truly.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
In systems where life/death is on the line, you do not put in ANY extraneous code
Remember that it's not just the lives at the "pointy end" of a weapon that are at risk; there are plenty of "good guys" you do not want to erroneously harm. There are people who maintain and prep the weapons, guys who use them (don't want a malfunctioning weapon slung under your aircraft, do you?), and often "good guys" on the ground in the vicinity of the "bad guys". Most coders have no problem deploying buggy code, after-all a bug may only cause a blue screen and some embarrassment (perhaps an angry client) but that's NOT the standard for systems that can kill people (everything from avionics on airliners to drones and guided weapons, to some factory automation systems) either intentionally (as-in weapons) or unintentionally (as-in airliners)
Linux can now monopolize the death market!
The NG air vehicles (Global Hawk, Firescout,, Triton, UCLASS, and demonstrators) all use a real time operating system with no virtual memory machine. All of the flight systems are written to DO-178B or higher, either explicitly or through DOORS (one of them isn't written to DO-178B, but their DOORS artifacts are adequate that compliance could be backed in). There are a few parts that need more robust FMECA in the software, but their high altitude UAV team is working through that on Triton (the guidance and nav core is the same, so what they find is filtering back to the other aircraft).
The raytheon ground statioins, on the other hand, are pieces of shit, as is every single piece of software from General Atomics. Preds/reapers should never be allowed to fly over hostile combatants, much less their children or my children.
Oh hell no. That's fine for an oscilloscope. No way in hell it will be trusted for life safety critical applications. No virtual memory machine is acceptable.
change the linux license to prohibit the US military from using linux in their terrorist drones
Some use Linux in the ground stations only. Some use it in the vehicle, but again, in a mix: sometimes in the part that gathers data and relays it to the ground or records it (Linux has great support for networking, supporting various storage media, etc) and sometimes in the code that navigates, though the actual code that FLIES the machine may be in a different CPU w/o OS or running an RTOS. Again: it's quite a "mixed bag". There are a bunch of requirements that are very hard to achieve with off-the-shelf Linux (see RTCA specs like DO-178B) depending on what regulations are important to a given project. It would be really nice if the Linux community adopted some of these specs for the kernel NOT because it would make life easier for military uses (which, of course, it would), but because of the benefits to eveybody else. These specs would force higher quality into the kernel, and make Linux an easy and obvious choice for avionics for civilian aircraft, various maritime applications, and for things like industrial robotics (not just hobby robots but ones used in important/dangerous applications) among other "good" fields that even pacifists could love.
As I noted at http://cow.mu/2a1 - the Solaris license has an exclusion for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Perhaps this change is motivated by non-technical requirements?
One question - which CPUs are being used here? Pentiums or SPARCs?
it went in the lines of: "I dont care if you write a killer robot built on my code, I just want to get your changes back so I can build one myself"? Though I dont find it :(
So if the NSA now knows of backdoors, it must inform the military so they can be patched, who will then be forced to publish the fixes. Right?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Gee, sounds like someone has about IBM's 360 mainframe history and learned a lesson from it. i.e. quit building customized one-offs
They were using Windows XP.
> Military drones migrating to Linux
I smell a rat. And what are all those drones going to do when they get there? Mate? Hibernate for the winter? Migration, my foot! It's all a plot by Microsoft, I say!