Product category:
Embedded Software and Operating Systems
News Release from: LynuxWorks | Subject: LynxOS-178 2.3
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 14 December 2007
OS stacks up advantages for aerospace
Aircraft such as superliners can now support networked systems such as ARINC 664 AFDX that can communicate inside as well as outside the plane's internal systems.
Billed as a critical advancement in the development of software used onboard commercial and military aircraft, LynuxWorks has unveiled its improved Lynx Certifiable Stack (LCS), a hardware-independent feature in the new LynxOS-178 2.3 LCS represents the richest, most complete, partition-aware, ARINC 664-capable, DO-178B Level A-certifiable network stack on the market, and gives developers the ability to test their software applications in a deployed configuration while also providing support for safety-critical, deterministic networking in an ARINC 653 Integrated Modular Avionics environment
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 18 Apr 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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This innovation means aircraft such as superliners can now support networked systems such as ARINC 664 Aircraft Full-Duplex Exchange (AFDX) that can communicate inside as well as outside the plane's internal systems - whether to ground stations or other aircraft.
Developers of avionics systems traditionally have been unable to leverage available TCP/IP/UDP networking stacks that communicate between hardware platforms because their complexity made them nearly impossible to certify under safety-critical guidelines, a limitation that also affected how systems were tested and fixed.
In addition, LCS enables developers to use the profiling and debugging tools available within Luminosity, the Eclipse-based integrated development environment from LynuxWorks.
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LCS offers developers the ability to "test what you deploy" and "deploy what you test".
LCS surpasses the stack limitation through the use of deterministic networking, the ability of a network to guarantee that packets are sent or received within a specified amount of time as required to design platforms in accordance with the ARINC 653 Integrated Modular Avionics standard.
"The Lynx Certifiable Stack is another breakthrough achievement for developers of avionics and other safety-critical systems", says Joe Wlad, FAA-DER and director of product management at LynuxWorks.
"Not only will LCS enable developers to use deterministic networking capabilities in safety-critical, Integrated Modular Avionics systems, but it also will, for the first time, facilitate new measures for testing the reliability of these safety-critical applications in deploy mode, rather than the development environment".
Based on open standards, LynxOS-178 2.3 is an upgraded version of LynuxWorks' hard real-time operating system (RTOS) designed especially for safety-critical environments such as those found in the avionics, military and medical markets.
The LCS in LynxOS-178 2.3 supports the widest array of networking standards available including TCP/IP, UDP, ICMP and IGMP and networking utilities including FTP, TFTP, ARP, SNMPv3 and SNTP.
All features can be configured on a per-partition basis without compromising the network determinism mandated by ARINC 653.
Using LCS, avionics applications can either share Ethernet controllers or employ exclusive controllers.
Like all LynuxWorks products, LynxOS-178 supports open standards such the Posix API and the ARINC 653 specification.
Additionally, LynxOS-178 is the only real-time operating system to garner an FAA Reusable Software Component (RSC) certification.
LynxOS-178 2.3 and the Lynx Certifiable Stack are available now.
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