If this discussion has caught your interest and you have experience in Linux internals, you might be interested in joining the team at Boeing that is working towards broader use of Linux in aerospace. Here are two links to open positions:

    https://jobs.boeing.com/job/hazelwood/embedded-linux-senior-software-engineer-virtual/185/51449210064
    https://jobs.boeing.com/job/st-louis/embedded-linux-lead-software-architect-chief-virtual/185/51449210736

We have a related issue in US civilian Federal agencies, where the IT security posture has been moving for some time to a formal compliance scheme. The idea is that to manage things at scale, it's desirable to have certified solutions, and mandate a very broad set of controls.

This makes general-purpose Linux systems a hard sell -- Ubuntu and RHEL have e.g. FIPS-validated encryption stacks, but they're generally older releases (currently Ubuntu 20.04 is certified and 22.04 certification is pending), and of course limiting your choice of distro is unwelcome for computational researchers. For data at rest, there are certified self-encrypting hard drives, but they are very hard to source, in part because the FIPS 140-2 suite is also very old, and the newer FIPS 140-3 suite is not yet certified.

There are probably ways around this, the diversity and flexibility of Linux cuts both ways, so you can maybe do a FOSS VM infrastructure on top of a certified hypervisor, and get the best of both worlds that way, but it's a lot of work.

And unlike in the aviation-safety world, it's not clear that the certified solution is technically better. It has pluses and minuses, but the biggest plus is administrative, not technical -- it's easy to check.

"Linux does not have a safety culture... Linux does not have a quality culture."

While this is critical for an airplane (as well as an automobile) I would think the seeds of this would be desirable in corporate application servers as well. While someone might not lose their life if an app server goes down the "move fast and break things" culture only gets you so far before a culture with adult supervision and an eye toward stability is required.

Here is the link to the full presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skaj70Qo3FA&list=PLbzoR-pLrL...

What operating systems are used for aircraft (or automobile) control/management systems?

Let them go implement fuchsia. It will check all their boxes right before it slams into a mountain from a km to mi conversion.

I thought we handled this years ago and coming from aviation experts is rather strange that they don't know the industry has migrated away from having a singular operating system that can't die to having a series of redundant fail-safes to fall back to when it does. It's strange to see the places where the microkernel debate still rages on....and how little investment is being made by those complaining multibillion $$ international corporations into projects like fuschia, RTOS, ZephyerOS, GNU Hurd, MIT Mach (or even Darwin), or even Minix!

I think these arguments are disingenuous and while they are valid the various organizations making them seem to aggressively not want to find solutions. I smell a strong desire to hold the vanguard of what they have built until they retire and can be unconcerned with compliance...understandable to a degree but harmful in the long run to be going so fast in the wrong direction.

Maybe Linux isn't a good fit, that's fine but they clearly don't care about that, they just don't want to implement anything and Linux is a convenient scape goat to not have to contribute back into an open source project even one on a BSD license

I would say Boeing doesn't have a safety or quality culture either. Look at the 737 Max and the Starliner.

As one of the authors of the referenced article, I would be happy to answer further questions. The discussion so far has been vigorous!

Honestly one of the craziest things is Linus saying security vulnerabilities are just normal bugs, don't deserve special treatment or to be fixed with priority, nor should they even be announced.

That's a terrible security approach. The article makes good points.

A lot of it is open (and friendly) criticism, but “With apologies to LOTR - one does not simply walk into aerospace using Linux” got me to laugh out loud.

well thats a nice he GNU Hurd can do excell in.