FuSa SIG/Charter

This charter is not yet finalized

Background

Modern safety critical systems such as autonomous vehicles or industrial robots are constantly and rapidly increasing their complexity with cloud-connected and dynamically deployed functions. Keeping such systems “safe” may require reducing their complexity by separating critical and non-critical parts, or implementing functions migration, which in turn can be achieved with system level virtualization. While Xen hypervisor might be the best tool for system virtualization it still is limited in use since there is currently no simple way to certify Xen-based product for Functional Safety requirements - most of them are simply not addressed by community-driven development model and process.

Goal

Create a framework and all required artifacts (documentation, tests, traceability matrices, etc.) that can be used to build and certify safety-critical systems (e.g compliant to IEC61508 or ISO26262) based on mainline Xen hypervisor codebase.

Members

Implementers

• ARM (Antonio Priore, Julien Grall, Robin Randhawa)
• Citrix (George Dunlap, Lars Kurth)
• EPAM (Artem Mygaiev, Alex Agizim)
• LF (Kate Stewart)
• Renesas (Hisao Munakata)
• Resiltech (Francesco Rossi)
• Xilinx (Stefano Stabellini)

Assessors

• Exida (Piotr Serwa)
• MIRA (David Ward)
• TUV Rheinland (Robert Heinen)
• TUV SUD (Bernhard Nalte, Claudio Gregorio)

Scope

SIG activities can be represented in several streams:

Safety Management System

Definition and implementation for the safety management system that can coexist with generic Xen mainline development.

Keywords: hazard analysis, safety manual

Documentation

Define and implement guidelines, templates and examples related to requirements, architecture, design and API documentation. Develop a strategy to produce missing documentation and work with the Community Interactions and Processes stream to ensure documentation stays up-to-date and is generated where needed.

Keywords: documentation, requirements, architecture, design, APIs, traceability

Verification Tests

Define and implement guidelines and examples related to the verification of requirements, architecture, design and APIs as required for safety certification. Develop a strategy to produce missing documentation and work with the Community Interactions and Processes stream to ensure documentation stays up-to-date and is generated where needed.

Keywords: traceability, testing, dynamic analysis

Community Interactions and Processes

Define and implement processes to keep documentation artifacts (requirements, architecture, design) and corresponding validation & verification artifacts updated without significant changes in existing development process and tools. This will require backing from all key members of Xen project community (maintainers, committers). Such artifacts can be made public which will benefit the community.

Define and implement processes to keep a subset of Xen hypervisor codebase MISRA compliant without significant impact on generic mainline development. This may include implementing guidelines and changes to coding standard, probably the most painful change requiring support from all key members of Xen project community (maintainers, committers), as well as retrospective application of defined guidelines to existing codebase.

Keywords: MISRA, fusa clang compiler, code maintainability, code coverage, static analysis, process, community, documentation, verification

Process Automation Tools

Most of the processes above shall be optimized or fully automated with software tools - either existing or new, FOSS or proprietary.

Keywords: code minimization tool, impact analysis tool, coverity, qa-verify, osstest

Considerations

At the initial stage SIG operate independently from Linux Foundation but this may be changed with time.