Safety Certifying an Open Source Project: The Example of Xen
summary
Xen moves from informal upstream development to a certified-ready product by mapping open-source processes to safety requirements, targeting ISO 26262 and IEC 61508 for ARM and AMD x86. Work targets ~50k LOC, estimates 2–2.5 years with ~65% effort on tests, split into a safety concept phase and a full artifacts phase, and aims for zero private code changes. Tooling includes MISRA C compliance, GitLab CI and real-hardware CI, PVH on x86, device assignment/virtio without privileged backends, and targeted IOMMU/interrupt/timer drivers.
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chapters (12)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:26Future of automotive compute
- 10:19Xen: Open Source Community
- 12:43Xen Hypervisor Rigorous Quality Process
- 16:11Safety certifying Xen Hypervisor
- 26:41Device Sharing Example
- 27:55Xen Hypervisor safety certification plan
- 32:29Software safety engineering work estimate
- 33:08Impact on the Xen Community
- 34:09Safety/Community Alignment: MISRA C
- 37:18Safety/Community Alignment: Documentation
- 37:30Safety/Community Alignment: Testing
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