cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/368257
Thoughts?
Something to understand here, it is exactly the same with the automotive industry. It is almost never about the actual safety, let me explain.
If you work as a safety engineer in a company like Boeing the name of the game is to not be responsible for the safety of a component at all. You always hide behind some kind of certifications then always ask a contractor to do it. The contractor might be scared too so will ask for a subcontractor and so on until someone is in an obscure juridiction or brave enough to just develop the software like almost anyone else but just with someone rubber-stamping the paperwork.
The safety engineer will have the paperwork so for them, it is safe! If there is an issue this is not them.
So for them Linux is absolutely out of the question, who wants to sign a paper for it?
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.
That is rich coming from the people that programmed the Boeing 737 MAX…
Those slides look like they’re written by someone who doesn’t understand Linux. Though Boeing and safety don’t seem to go hand in hand nowadays if that documentary about their safety standards and engineering is to believed. Blaming foreign pilots that got killed because of engineering changes that pilots weren’t fully trained on was low. Especially given how many airlines actually insisted on training for these systems but seemed to be fobbed off.
I’d rather fly Airbus.
Some context: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-54174223
