cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/368257
Thoughts?
Honestly just anti-foss rambling. Nothing is stopping them to make a custom hardened kernel with what they need. What they want is someone else to cater for them.
ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project announced that Boeing has joined as a Premier member, marking its commitment to Linux and its effective use in safety critical applications. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, ELISA is an open source initiative that aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems
I imagine this means they’re contributing both actively and financially to Linux.
I agree that a small, special purpose OS would probably be more suitable for safety-critical systems. On the other hand I highly doubt that the safety-culture is better at Boeing than in the Linux ecosystem.
I’d expect it to be about the same, with 737 MAX, yes, on one side and too many examples on the other.
You forget to take into account that every Boeing employee knows they are building systems that can kill people if things go wrong. Meanwhile on Linux a lot of bugs really don’t matter that much, especially in -rc and otherwise non LTS versions.
Taking that into account their safety culture is much worse.
Linux and the open source community may be chaotic … but companies like Boeing are completely corporate and they will risk or even sacrifice safety if it means making a few extra million or preventing the loss of millions in profits. They’ll calculate how much it will cost to make settlements with the families of the dead or in to issuing changes or recalls and figure out which is cheaper … pay off the dead or fix the problem. If paying off the dead is cheaper, they don’t mind watching the body count.
That is rich coming from the people that programmed the Boeing 737 MAX…
What ?
I work in ATC (air traffic control) and everything runs on Linux, from radars correlation to flight data processing.
And it’s not just us, most Air navigation service provider in the world works the same way.
Well, NASA trusts Linux enough to send it to Mars. They build rockets, so it should be good enough for flying busses. Unless you don’t trust your software engineers, but then having them build a custom microkernel OS instead sounds not much better.
Every NASA crewed launch to ISS from US soil is on a stack that uses Linux for avionics: Falcon 9 and Dragon 2. The Starlink constellation is also a massive deployment of Linux nodes in space.
The backup NASA commercial crew system from the 737 Max people hasn’t flown people yet and probably won’t this year, perhaps never. They somehow managed to have two critical software failures on their first orbital flight test, either of which would have caused loss of vehicle without intervention. Both should have been caught with comprehensive testing.
