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Open Source used in new aviation technologies
RandySC writes "
The following quote is from the last paragraphs of the section under Cockpit Contrivances.
Dean Vogel, VP of research and technology at Cirrus Design (says)
"Typically, to certify software with the FAA, you have to start off with all source code, and be capable of testing all types of combo calls," (...) He notes that using an operating system such as Windows NT to do this "is an extremely daunting task at the very least, if not impossible." Instead, engineers use open-source software so that they can control the source code and track modifications they make to it."
"
I do tech support for a company that recently
shipped around 500 machines to FAA sites throughout
the country that run NT Workstation. Needless to
say we had many many problems with those systems.
'While Cirrus Design chose open-source software, Avidyne has received FAA certification to use Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. "By taking an essentially off-the-shelf operating system, it is easier to write applications with the future in mind rather than having to write all the software from scratch," says Charles Gunderson, general manager at Trimble Avionics. For instance, to develop a weather radar, engineers simply have to create a hardware interface and write a Windows application to display the proper information.'
Right, and to write a similar application under Linux, you have to rewrite the Operating System and the motherboard BIOS, rebuild the disk controller firmware and design a custom system bus bridge IC... sheesh...
It never ceases to amaze me that someone who can navigate a half-dozen config files littered with arcane symbols will frequently have problems with documents phrased in clear English.
... but it is not the ONLY one. Thus, the phrase "Open Source" is NOT synonymous with "Linux".
... but Linux is being a bear to set up. I want to get away from MSFT, though, so I will keep trying.
Yes, Linux is an Open Source OS
Maybe I have been away from a command prompt too long
Bill
"Onward through the fog!"
What about that cruiser that was running Windows NT, where someone did a divide by zero and it crashed their networks, and they lost propulsion?
Remember on Star Trek: The next generation, where some hostile alien gets on board and disrupts things by some energy surge into the computer console. I used to laugh, "they'd never put vital systems under the control of one central computer or network. You can't bring down everything like that in real life." Who's laughing now?
i'm not the original poster, but do work for the DOD. in all honesty, it's a nightmare. there are at least four major reasons the goverment is abondoning unices:
1) user whine about ease of use. they want it like there home computers, and they are much more easily trained; ie they already know the three finger salute and how to handle a bsod, for example.
2) upkeep. unix licenses, updates, patches are much more expensive than msdog. and older readers will recall how some less-than-honorable unix vendors screwed the gov regularly in the eighties by forcing expensive workstation upgrades by obsoleting software, etc. what goes around, comes around.
3) development. how about 5-10 thousand dollars per developer seat for software development tools? it's true, a lot of unix shops pay that much and more.
4) recovery. key people leave. a big site loses it's admin -- everything fails. there's a larger pool of win people to choose from for recovery issues.
5) low hardware costs. $1200 pc vs. $5000 workstation. which one can you fix faster when it smokes?
anyway, i guess thats the gist. i hope the OpenGL piping stuff moves along, cuz that's a critical technology that could drop most of these barriers.
> because of [Ada's] rock-solid ability to not crash or do nasty things.
Yeeeeeahhhh, right.
That depends on the quality of the compiler. Oh, sure, there's a test suite that each compiler vender must past before it get's labled Ada9x.
But, like most things, if you beat it with a sitck long enough, even most Ada run-time environments will, uh, do unexpected things.
Anyway, robustness was only one of Ada's design goals. And like any programming language, Ada is a set of compromises.
Airbus had all of this hashed out with with their tripple redundant architecture anyway.
That was the destroyer Yorktown. It had to be towed back into port, at least partway. I saw a story a month ago that it was still out of commission. All sorts of troubles with NT based fire control systems.
Also, the carrier Vinson (the world's largest moveable object) was slow leaving port to the Mideast. Same problemos?
Hi,
....
....
THere was an article about how a possible culprit in the Nova Scotia crash of the SwissAir jet may have been a fire caused by the overheating of its inflight entertainment system....
.... Running NT on an Intel processor
.... One can only think, if Linux was used the system may not have required as much CPU (and related heat)
How many more must die before NT is unmasked as the incubus it is?
with all due respect to the lives lost.
A looming problem is floating point arithmetic handling. This has already taken down a rocket (french arianne), and could conceivably take down anything that critically depends on floating point numbers. It behooves all of us who program floating point code to pressure MS to completely implement and document IEEE floating point conformance in their compiler tools. Currently, the documentation is not very good, and according to one authority (Kahan at Berkeley), their implementation isn't too good either.
So, yes, with all due respect, it is completely possible for such a thing to happen. Whether this is probable or not depends on how cavalierly MS treats issues, such as floating point arithmetic, in NT.
Personally, again with all due respect, I fully believe that it is going to take loss of life, public pressure (read crusade such as Mother Against Drunk Driving) and a literal Act of Congress to force software manufacturers to warranty their products.
Your life may depend on it.
>>I hope someday you get the experience of losing someone very close to you, so you can experience the pain of death on a level a
little more real than a video game. Then perhaps you'll think twice about using peoples' lives as pawns in your pathetic game.
Who's pathetic for HOPING that someone loses someone in a jet crash so that they can feel YOUR pain?
Ehh, no? They are of course using Visual Basic like all the rest of us.
My company (anonymous for now...) uses Linux for mission critical development in the aviation field.
Thank you.
I too don't think NT, per se, was to blame.
But, the "must... buy... COTS..." mentality, where COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) == "whatever's on the Big Bosses' Desk" is a very dangerous one. It sounds like they went with a Wintel box 'cause hey, that's what a computer _is_, right? An Intel processor and a Microsoft operating system? Right?
roblimo wrote:
Besides, I've found that many "trained" MS people have enough self-acquired Linux experience (like, they use it at home) to competently administer a Linux system at work. A smart IT or MIS manager would *ask* his/her people if any of them have Linux or FreeBSD experience before deciding NT has any labor-availability advantages over these new-breed Unices.
Sometime there's more Linux experience floating around than management thinks...
Hopefully, this is one of the things that the various Linux certification programs will help fix. It will put a line on resumes, so managers and human resources departments can start taking note of it. Also, the industry seems to prefer people who have paid for expensive certification tests.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
zaha wrote:
until linsux is real-time, its applications in the embedded, mission-critical markets will be limited.
I wouldn't use a standard Linux kernel for a real-time application, that would be silly. The same goes for a Solaris kernel or an NT kernel. None of them are designed for real-time operation. If I was doing a simple real-time system, I would use a simple real-time kernel like QNX RTOS or Caldera's DR-DOS.
For a more complicated system, I would use a hybrid RT system like Real-Time Linux. Check it out, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Also, the company I worked for then did a lot of Military avionics, of which none were done with Ada, they were still using JOVIAL.
Linux isn't mentioned, just open source. And a few paragraphs later, in the same article, an NT-based cockpit weather display -- that has been FAA certified -- is mentioned.
? 78
And yes, the open source code the FAA prefers is usually written in ADA. It's not an easy language to work with, but once you get ADA code to run, it is more solid than NT and Linux put together.
See: http://www.techsightings.com/cgi-bin/ts_review.pl
--Robin Miller
airplane knowing that the penguin is watching
over me.
Even though penguins can't fly.
Anyhow, it's good to know that really mission-
critical applications are being entrusted to real
stable systems and development paradigms.
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Posted by zaha:
until linsux is real-time, its applications in the embedded, mission-critical markets will be limited.
McCarran uses NT for flight & luggage pickup display and it can't even handle that very well.
Did anyone coming in for Comdex notice any BSOD's around the airport on your way in or out? '-)
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
ha ha ha, linux isn't even in the same league as real mission-critical OS's like NonStop or QNX. get a clue.
It -MAY- be a hard language to learn, if you're used to, say, C or C++, due to the wildly different paradigm, but once you understand the ideas behind ADA, it's almost as easy to program in, IMHO.
(Having said all that, I'm sticking to C/C++ - JAVA only where necessary - because I personally prefer them.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Also... do you understand the meaning of "so and so writes XYZ"?
I was under the impression that the FAA mandated, or at least highly recommended the use of Ada in all mission critical applications because of its rock-solid ability to not crash or do nasty things. Is this true? Or has the aircraft industry given way to C/C++?
If you actually read the entire article,
ONE company is using Open Source to develop
their application.
Shortly after the Open Source development
is mentioned, the article continues on stating
that another company has received FAA approval
to use Windows NT for their application.
-- Bret
Nice to see the tidbit about open-source software... but it's even nicer to see the general aviation industry make a comeback. Of course, it's not necessarily Linux - they could easily use FreeBSD or eCos for that matter.
--
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
Wasn't there a story about a Russian shuttle someone wanted to use Linux on... Does it overlap with this story any?
There was an article about how a possible culprit in the Nova Scotia crash of the SwissAir jet may have been a fire caused by the overheating of its inflight entertainment system... Running NT on an Intel processor... One can only think, if Linux was used the system may not have required as much CPU (and related heat)... How many more must die before NT is unmasked as the incubus it is?
I've seen ridiculous Linux propaganda on Slashdot before, but this takes the cake.
To take something as deadly serious as the Swissair crash and twist it to meet your Linux bigotry needs is absolutely disgusting.
Um, couldn't it have just been a feeble attempt at humor?
Not that I think making light of personal tragedy is any more acceptable than using it to feed someone's twisted propoganda needs, but you might be reading more into his comment than he intended...
Jay (=
It sounds like windows NT controls ONLY the moving
map display and NOT the communications (as I first
feared). However, I'd hate to think that NT may
be guiding airplanes... especially out here in
california with all these mountains near the
airports. But, NT usually gives valid data until
it crashes... and if all the pilot loses is the
moving-map display, I know there are other navigation methods available.
Of course, there's still the question of WHY use
it at ALL???
The last project I worked on was FAA related. It used C.
:P
...
My company's biggest contract with the FAA is a system that was developed using Pascal.
Ada is still used for military stuff tough
- sigs are for wimps.
Interestingly enough, I'm contracting for the FAA and of the 2 billion dollars worth of projects, 90% is Microsoft, the rest being SunOS. In fact, we are required to keep up with MS upgrades and port to their software updates and object advances (i.e. SQL 7, IE5, ADO 2.0 etc)
Where the openess in that?
"Where is my mind?"
I believe one reason was the standard MS PCs are readily available throughout the world. Even joe-schmoe has one at home, so he can do work from there.
It basicaly seems like, hey MS seems to run the show, if we can't beat them, join them.
"Where is my mind?"