On April 4th 2016 a new Linux Foundation initiative called the Civil Infrastructure Platform
was announced. CIP aims to share efforts around building a Linux-based
commodity platform for industrial grade products that need to be
maintained for anything between 25 and 50 years - in some cases even
longer. Codethink is one of the founding members.
Industrial grade use cases
In order to describe why this initiative is relevant let me go over
the use cases that motivate companies like Siemens, Toshiba, Hitachi,
and Renesas to share efforts.
During the Open Source Leadership Summit,
Noriaki Fukuyasu (Linux Foundation) and myself, based on the experience
of Siemens, Hitachi and Toshiba, described the development life cycle
in industrial grade use cases. For example, a railway management system
is as follows:
- Analysis + design + development: 3 - 6 years
- Customizations and extensions: 2 - 4 years
- The certification process and other authorizations take a year.
- Each new release or update has to go through further certifications and authorizations that take between 3 and 6 months.
- The system is expected to work for between 25 and 50 years.
So on average, an industrial grade product might take 5 to 7 years
from conception to deployment. This is coherent with our experience in
other industries like automotive, where life cycles are also quite long
despite the expected lifetime being shorter.
A key part of the life cycle is maintenance. Due to its length, the
associated risks are high. The certification processes to introduce
significant changes in any already deployed systems are painful and
expensive. In addition, the capacity to simulate a production
environment is, in general, limited. This is true in other cases like
energy production plans, for instance.
Open Source principles in the Civil Infrastructure industry
It’s obvious that Open Source could have a dramatic impact in this
industry. By sharing efforts, corporations can commoditise a significant
portion of the base system focusing on differentiation factors,
increasing control through transparency and the quality of that starting
point over time. Collaboration with upstream will bring even higher
impact benefits.
Two immediate challenges come to mind when thinking about Open Source in this industry:
- Development of processes and practices to produce software for safety critical environments.
- Bridging the gap between the Open Source approach for software maintenance and the approach currently taken when building large-scale platform projects. For instance, how can approaches oriented to update any specific Open Source software component to the latest upstream stable version be compatible with any typical industry SDLC?
Can you reduce the gap?
We have for years been working on transformation projects for which one
of the goals has been to reduce the gap between the software our
customers ship and what upstream is continuously releasing. One of the
key steps is to adapt an organisation’s processes using FOSS tools. Over
the years we have been a strong advocate that the closer to upstream
you are, the more benefits you reap from the Open Source development
model, maintenance cost reductions being one of the main advantages.
So why did we get involved in an initiative that aims to maintain a kernel for 25 years then?
The short answer would be... because we love a challenge!
Safety critical with Linux-based systems is a challenge currently
being faced in the automotive industry for instance, where Codethink is a
strong player. When we analysed some of the industrial-grade use cases,
it called our attention not just to the magnitude of the second
challenge enumerated above, related with super long term maintenance,
but also the apparent conflict between the industry requirements and the
referred well known Open Source practices.
Hence the main driver for an Open Source consultancy like Codethink
in participating in an initiative like CIP is to learn by doing, that
is, putting the Open Source development, delivery and maintenance best
practices under stress in one of the toughest environments. We bring our
experience in producing embedded Linux based systems and our Open
Source culture, to work together with industry leaders in finding
solutions to these challenges, by looking at them with FOSS eyes.
Current activities
Codethink is participating in CIP in several capacities, the most relevant being:
Kernel maintenance
The first CIP approved kernel is 4.4, an LTS kernel supported until Feb 2018. Ben Hutchings
is the initial CIP kernel maintainer. Besides providing support for the
reference platforms, Ben is working on several activities like
backporting the security patches, such as those from the KSPP and consolidating the maintenance policies, taking those from the kernel community as reference.
Testing tooling
kernelci.org is the most
successful testing project in Open Source. Its impact in the kernel
community is growing, as is the number of people and companies involved.
It was designed and developed as a service where the testing activities
can take place in distributed board farms (labs).
Codethink has been working on making the tools easy to deploy on
developer machines through a VM, so they can test kernels on directly
connected boards. This first milestone of the CIP testing project is
called Board At Desk - Single Developer. This activity was described at the Open Source Leadership Summit 2017 and the first beta released during ELC 2017.
Conclusion
The challenges for Open Source that Industrial-grade product
development and maintenance introduce are great, especially in two
aspects: safety-critical and maintenance. Codethink is working on CIP to
help the industry to overcome these challenges by adding our Open
Source perspective.
Learn more about the CIP project by checking the following slides and videos from the conferences in which CIP members have participated.
No comments:
Post a Comment