After Linux may be equipped with real-time capabilities, there is a second hurdle that has to be taken in order to make Linux a general-purpose operating system for embedded systems of all types: certification for its use in a safety-critical environment.
The difficulties of such a certification are that, due to its development model, Open Source software per se can not be considered as conformantly developed; in consequence, new certifications procedures have to be developed. In a first step, two completely different tasks have to be completed. 1. The provision and validation of suitable certification processes and 2. the application of these processes to individual embedded systems. The main advantage of this approach in two steps is that the first step only has to be taken once, as the developed processes can be reused later on. This exactly is the goal of the OSADL SIL2LinuxMP project. Participants in this project can either have their systems certified or access the processes and apply them in own certifications of Linux-based embedded systems.
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