With open source Operating Systems (OS) like Linux becoming mainstream, and with the advent of Open Source Software (OSS) in safety critical domain, it becomes necessary to comply with the developed OSS safety critical system with international safety standards. Therefore, our functional safety team collaborates with the open source community to establish a process to certify OSS/Linux with IEC61508 standards.

We are contributing towards the development of a compliance route using IEC61508 specification and developing tools that help in evidence generation to prove compliance of Linux OS. The certification for base components of Linux would help businesses in automotive, railway and industrial domains to leverage the benefits of OSS, reduce development cost, and improve time-to-market for products and services.

As shown in the image below, the proprietary software products comprise of proper development procedure with sufficient documents. However, in OSS based products, the documentation and development procedure are not available. With the devised process, we are trying to generate evidence by analysis and test tools that fulfill the requirements of documentation and development procedure for safety certification.