Iniziativa Software Finmeccanica :: Centro di Ricerca sul software

Obiettivo

In present days Linux is able to offer lot functionalities such as reliability, scalability, high performance computing as good as its COTS competitors. Plus, it has new features, new possibilities to offer to its end-users and to the IT companies using it as a platform for their products. Those possibilities can range from reduced costs to openness and, with respect to some competitors, reliability.
This project concerns the design and development of a Finmeccanica Linux OS distribution, available for each FNM companies. In facts, it aims to achieve two simultaneous goals: on one hand the construction of the distribution itself by taking and re-using as much as possible from the Linux world and pouring in the requirements derived from years of successful work in the IT, military and security fields. On the other hand, the participants will acquire an in-depth technical and organisational know-how thanks to active contribution to provide in all the projects different theme areas.

The most relevant elements that the initiative aims at introducing in the Linux distribution are:

Support of Hard Real-Time features in the system kernel that can be installed and run on target embedded platforms

Multi-core support

Standardisation of an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) both suitable for most of today’s needs and task in software development and flexible enough to be expanded/extended for the support of new languages, libraries, target platform, etc.

Pave the way to make system certification easier for Finmeccanica Linux based systems

The main motivations for all participants for the involvement in the projects lay in the limits that Linux showed over the years for a full-scale use in production systems.
Today the Linux world offers a wide range of distributions, suitable for most tasks. A Linux distribution generally includes the kernel, GNU libraries and tools, command-line shells, the graphical X Window System and an accompanying desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME, together with thousands of application software packages from office suites to compilers, drivers, text editors, and scientific tools. As it turns out, however, most distributions do not fit FNM company SW operative requirement. This project aims to build a Linux distribution suitable both for development and embedded targets and it is created from source code in order to be as much as possible as customizable. The FNM Linux can be customized for different target architectures and that chosen are x86, PowerPC and ARM, which have Hard Real Time (HRT) constraints. The real time capabilities regard both the high performance computing and the system deterministic response time. The failure of these requirements typically results in a severe failure of the system and loss of human life. Actually, available Linux OS are not compliant with Hard RT requirements. The objective of the project is to modify the official kernel in order to add the HRT features and create a system capable of guaranteeing timing requirements of the processes under its control.
The CPU market trend is oriented to multi-core elaboration, so the emerging technology is oriented to collapse the earlier distributed environment in a single elaboration node. Recent and future system take into account both specific topics like allocation of tasks, synchronisation etc., but also study the impact of multi-processing on schedulability and HRT issues. Even though it enhances the processing capability of the computing platform, on the other hand multi-processing introduces new issues in schedulability analysis models, still largely based on assumptions valid for mono-processor platforms only.
This issue thus introduces also the problem of the definition of methods for the design of HRT software on multi-core systems. In fact, in order to respect the relevant performance requirements, the adoption of suitable OS alone is not sufficient and necessarily has to be coupled with a suitable design method and tool. Within the scope of the project is to develop a new integrated development environment (FNM-IDE) to provide rules and means that helps (and in some cases, forces) the designer to follow specific patterns and adopt appropriate architectural choices for these new RT multi-core systems.
An other element to take into account is system safety and reliability engineering, which is an engineering discipline. Continuous changes in technology, environmental regulation, civil and military safety concerns make the analysis of complex safety-critical systems more and more demanding. A key activity is the study of safety standards, like DO-178B, to make the FNM Linux distribution Safety certifiable. Even if these standards are apparently different, they share many practices.
The initiative strongly believe that this approach to Linux matches very well the overall Finmeccanica approach of re-using what is available on the market making it more suitable to the companies’ tasks and needs. For each of the companies involved having such an improved version of the Linux OS would be a valuable asset in both terms of cost-effectiveness and quality of its final products.

The initiative is leaded by MBDA Italia SPA, which manages 4 focus groups. Each focus group is participated by all interested FNM Companies.

The 4 focus group concerns:

Linux FNM Distribution

FNM RT Kernel

FNM Integrated Development Environment

Safety Certificability

Gruppo di lavoro

Prof. D. P. Bovet	Università Tor Vergata
Prof. Cesati	Università Tor Vergata
Andrea Bastoni	Università Tor Vergata
Prof. Marco Ferretti	Università di Pavia
Prof. Alessandro Rubini	Università di Pavia
Christian Di Biagio	MBDA
Guido Pennella	MBDA
Fabrizio Batino	MBDA
Francesco Giammarino	MBDA

Pubblicazioni

TBW

Tesi di Laurea

Nell'anno 2008 sono previste:

- 5 tesi secondo livello (6 mesi)
- 3 tesi primo livello (3 mesi)

torna su

“High Performance GNU/Linux Laboratory”