So it’s no secret that some parts of the army in the USA and my country (UK) sometimes use legacy software like DOS for niche roles as they’re robust including older versions of Windows.
But… where does Linux fit in this? It’s a kernel OS that’s used in top of the line supercomputers, workstations, medical equipment and weather stations.
I imagine some aspects of this would be military secrets but how do they use it? I know that Linux was used for certain space projects with NASA but I’m talking about army applications.
TLDR : Does the penguin OS power shooty shooty machines and tanks
I’ve heard that the DoD uses RHEL pretty extensively. RHEL in the US Military
That article says that the US military has the largest single install base for RHEL in the world, but that was about 15 years ago, I don’t know if that’s still true.
Apparently back then the US nuclear sub fleet and its sonar systems also ran on RHEL.
I suspect lots of military hardware runs some form of *Nix or BSD type system. Many embedded systems run some *Nix type OS, and a huge portion of the developed world’s weaponry is smart, so it it full of low power embedded systems and custom SoCs.
Red Hat has long benefitted from being the primary enterprise Linux company based in the US (no, we don’t count Oracle). SUSE created US-based Rancher Government Solutions to get some of that business and it seems to have been getting a lot of interest, despite being early days. They did a good job of focusing on modern technologies and immutable systems.
Don’t look too deeply into this unless you’re comfortable discovering that the military and security state is a prolific contributor to many open source projects.
SELinux was a product of the NSA. Maybe the best thing that agency has done.
When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source. - Major General Nicholas Justice
Check out the World of Tanks forums for information.
There are many reasons Microsoft software is only “good” (and I’m using that word loosely) in business and home settings. Can you imagine a rocket taking off and windows suddenly “rebooting to complete updates” (or whatever it is that it says along those lines)?
Rockets probably use a dedicated OS that is safety validated. Getting something validated for critical operations is a massive endeavor.
Correct, missiles use something like RTEMS, which is named because it was used for missiles (no really, it originally stood for Real Time Executive for Missile Systems) and the operating demands for missiles have to be real-time given their unique edge cases.
Disclaimer: I worked on RTEMS in College
Running a full OS on a rocket? Why? It’s mostly some embedded stuff, some kind of arduino.
The launching platform though… maybe a minimalist OS with a curses interface.
