Events

Session Highlight: CIP Installed: Sustainable Software Stacks in Long-living Products

Civil Infrastructure Platform is excited to participate in the Linux Foundations’ OpenSource Summit North America Event. We are showing up in a variety of ways, as a sponsor, with several sessions and hosting the CIP Mini-Summit.  

On June 29 from 3:20-410 pm CT, Urs Gleim, Siemens AG & Yoshitake Kobayashi, Toshiba Corporation will be giving a talk called, “CIP Installed: Sustainable Software Stacks in Long-living Products.”

Check out talk details below and read on to learn how to register for the event. 

Since the Civil Infrastructure Platform project launched in April 2016, we work with other open source communities to develop a super long-term supported (SLTS) open source “base layer” of industrial grade software that enables the implementation of building blocks in civil infrastructure projects. Long-term sustainability becomes a more major issue for not only industrial IoT systems, such as power plants, traffic lights, communications and weather systems, but also consumer IoT systems such as automotive and smart homes. In this talk, we will show the latest results of the CIP community in first half. Then we move to introduce examples of how CIP is used in real-world use cases.

Register for Open Source Summit NA today to attend this virtual session. 

Session Highlight: Secure Boot and Over-the-Air Updates – That’s Simple, No?

The Civil Infrastructure Platform is thrilled to be sponsoring the Linux Foundations’ OpenSource Summit North America Event. In addition to having a virtual booth, CIP reps will be giving several talks as well as hosting the CIP Mini-Summit.  

On June 30 from 9:30 to 10:20 am CT,  Jan Kiszka with Siemens AG will be giving a talk called, “Secure Boot and Over-the-Air Updates – That’s Simple, No?”  

Check out talk details below and read on to learn how to register for the event. 

Locking down embedded Linux devices via secure boot is almost solved these day. Combining this with rollback-capable over-the-air updates shouldn’t be hard then. But as often, the devil is in the detail. When he comes out, you can easily end up with an insecure system or one that does not update anymore. Or both.

In this talk, we will present patterns and tools for secure OTA system updates that are being developed in the Software Update Workgroup of the Civil Infrastructure Platform project. We will introduce an OTA pattern consisting of redundant update images that are deployed and managed by SWUpdate and switched by a boot loader. We will discuss the options and implication of securing those images, for the boot process as well as the runtime of the images. Then we will walk through UEFI-based secure boot processes, explain shortcomings of commodity boot loaders are and where to use the embedded boot loader EFI Boot Guard instead. Finally, we will also have a look at plain U-Boot-based setups, discuss if its new UEFI mode can help to unify architectures and explain what to do when it is not available.

Register for Open Source Summit NA today to attend this virtual session.

Session Highlight: CIP Kernel Team Activities to Accomplish Super Long Term Support

At the end of June, CIP will be participating in many ways at the Linux Foundations’ OpenSource Summit + ELC North America Event. In addition to having a virtual booth, CIP reps will be giving several talks as well as hosting the CIP Mini-Summit.  

On June 29 from 9:30 to 10:20 am CDT,  Masashi Kudo, Cybertrust Japan Co., Ltd. & SZ Lin  (林上智), Moxa Inc. will be presenting “CIP Kernel Team Activities to Accomplish Super Long Term Support” 

Check out talk details below and read on to learn how to register for the event. 

CIP (Civil Infrastructure Platform) project aims to support industrial-grade systems in secure and reliable manners. CIP kernel team was launched in 2016 under CIP to provide and maintain Linux kernel for 10+ years, because life cycles of such industrial-grade systems are very long by their nature.

By steadily releasing SLTS (super long-term support) kernel based on LTS4.4 and LTS4.19, the team has continuously improved the release processes and tools to facilitate the team activities. The team works with LTS and other open source projects to share its findings and contribute outputs. Also, test automation has been strengthened. During the long support period of 10+ years, a large number of minor releases are planned, so the cost reduction effect by test automation will be enormous. Open source tools like “cip-kernel-sec” and “classify-failed-patches” were introduced to track the status of CVEs and to identify patches needed to apply to stable kernel, respectively.

This presentation updates CIP kernel team activities, by featuring collaborative works with LTS , the status of test automation using KernelCI and LAVA, and experiences of using the open source tools.

Register for Open Source Summit NA today to attend this virtual session.

On June 29- July 2 the Linux Foundation is hosting Open Source Summit North America.  Open Source Summit is a virtual event that connects the open source ecosystem under one roof. It’s a unique environment for cross-collaboration between developers, sysadmins, devops, architects and others who are driving technology forward. bringing together. 

CIP will be participating in many ways at the event including having a virtual booth, several talks by CIP reps as well as hosting the CIP Mini-Summit.  

Find details below on two talks given by Wolfgang Mauerer with Technical University of Applied Sciences Regensburg / Siemens AG. 

Open Source in Research and Reality
June 30, 2020
4:15 pm to 5:05 pm CT

Well-known, large communities and open source projects like the Linux kernel are an often pursued goal of scientific analysis, and questions of interest cover a broad range — core OS design, collaborative software engineering, software architectural questions and community health, to just name a few. However, many research questions are biased towards what can be nicely published, and not on the most pressing problems of projects.

This leads to a gap between what OSS communities need to know, and the insights science can provide. In this (likely opinionated) talk, we discuss this gap from two often opposite sides: As a researcher, the author has never understood why industrial belief in software engineering research seems to often stop at using design patterns, and why industry does not try to benefit more from scientific insight. As an industrial practitioner, the author has never understood why academia would need to tell industrial engineers that have participated in OSS projects for years what they have done, post facto, and why research does not listen more closely to what industry is interested in, and needs to know. We suggest some possibilities to shrink the gap.

Safety, Security, Quality: Artificial Intelligence versus Common Sense
July 1, 2020
3:05 pm to 3:55 pm CT

Embedded Linux is a standard core component of systems deployed in challenging and critical scenarios. Machine learning and statistical techniques are increasingly used to ascertain or even predict various quality properties — the number of open issues to judge reliability or maximum latencies for real-time systems –, or to improve development and maintenance processes: Techniques to automatically select patches for back-porting or to identify security critical fixes have recently been suggested.

While machine learning undoubtedly has its advantages, it is by no means a panacea for solving all engineering issues that have been around for decades, and issues like lack of explainability or over-confident trust in results often cause unease. But it is also unwise to dismiss them just because they differ from traditional engineering approaches.

In this talk, we survey recent uses of ML techniques in OSS systems development and maintenance, address their benefits and disadvantages, and give recommendations on how especially industrial system integrators and solution providers can enjoy the benefits of new ML-based engineering methods without suffering from new problems.

Register for Open Source Summit NA today to attend these sessions.