SAN FRANCISCO – April 19, 2020 –  Today, the ELISA (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) Project, an open source initiative that aims to create a shared set of tools and processes to help companies build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications and systems, announced that Codethink, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, NVIDIA and Red Hat has joined its global ecosystem.

Linux is used in safety-critical applications with all major industries because it can enable faster time to market for new features and take advantage of the quality of the code development processes which decreases the issues that could result in loss of human life, significant property damage, or environmental damage. Launched in February 2019 by the Linux Foundation, ELISA will work with certification authorities and standardization bodies across industries to document how Linux can be used in safety-critical systems.

“Open source software has become a significant part of the technology strategy to accelerate innovation for companies worldwide,” said Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at The Linux Foundation. “We want to reduce the barriers to be able to use Linux in safety-critical applications and welcome the collaboration of new members to help build specific use cases for automotive, medical and industrial sectors.”

Milestones

After a little more than two years, ELISA has continued to see momentum in project and technical milestones. Examples include:

• Successful Workshops: In February, ELISA hosted its 6^th workshop with more than 120 registered participants. During the workshop, members and external speakers discussed cybersecurity expectations in the automotive world, code coverage of glibc and Intel’s Linux test robot. Learn more in this blog. The next workshop is scheduled for May 18-20 and is free to attend. Register here.
• New Ambassador Program: In October 2020, ELISA launched a program with thought leaders with expertise in functional safety and Linux kernel development. These ambassadors are willing to speak at events, write articles and work directly with the community on mentorships or onboarding new contributors. Meet the ambassadors here. 
• Mentorship Opportunities: The Linux Foundation offers a Mentorship Program with projects that are designed to help developers with the necessary skills to contribute effectively to open source communities. A recent program, ELISA participated in the Fall 2020 session with Code coverage metrics for GLibC and a Linux Kernel mentorship focused on CodeChecker. This project supports ELISA’s goals to gain experience in using various status analysis methods and tools available in the Linux kernel. Learn more here.
• Working Groups: Since launch, the project has created several working groups that collaborate and work towards providing resources for System integrators to apply and use to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively on their systems. Current groups include an Automotive Working Group, Medical Devices Working Group, Safety Architecture Working Group,  Kernel Development Process Working Group and Tool Investigation and Code Improvement Sub-Working Group to focus on specific activities and goals. Learn more or join a working group here. 

“The primary challenge is selecting Linux components and features that can be evaluated for safety and identifying gaps where more work is needed to evaluate safety sufficiently,” said Shuah Khan, Chair of the ELISA Project Technical Steering Committee and Linux Fellow at the Linux Foundation. “We’ve taken on this challenge to make it easier for companies to build and certify Linux-based safety-critical applications by exploring potential methods to enable engineers to answer that question for their specific system.”

Learn more about the goals and technical strategy in this white paper. 

Growing Ecosystem

After a little more than two years, the ELISA Project has grown by 300%. With new members Codethink, Horizon Robotics, Huawei Technologies, NVIDIA and Red Hat, the project currently has 20 members that collaborate to define and maintain a standardized set of processes and tools that can be integrated into Linux-based, safety-critical systems seeking safety certification. These new members join BMW Car IT GmbH, Intel, Toyota, ADIT, AISIN AW CO., arm, Elektrobit, Kuka, Linuxtronix. Mentor, Suzuki, Wind River, Automotive Grade Linux and OTH Regensburg.

“Codethink has been working with ELISA for a few years and we are excited to continue our engagement as a member,” said Shaun Mooney, Division Manager at Codethink. “Open Source Software, particularly Linux, is being used more and more in safety applications and Codethink has been looking at how we can make software trustable for a long time. We’ve been working to understand how we can use complex software and guarantee it will function as we want it to. This problem needs to be tackled collectively and ELISA is a great place to collaborate with experts in both safety and software. We’ve been working with most of the working groups since the start of ELISA and will continue to be active participants, using our expert knowledge of Linux and Open Source to help advance the state of the art for safety.”

“Safety is the most important feature of a self-driving car,” said Huang Chang, co-founder and CTO of Horizon Robotics. “Horizon’s investment into functional safety is one of the most important ones we’ve ever made, and it provides a critical ingredient for automakers to bring self-driving cars to market. The creative safety construction the ELISA project is undertaking complements Horizon’s functional safety endeavor and continued commitment to certifying Linux-based safety-critical systems.”

“Huawei is one of the most important Linux kernel contributors and recently joined the automotive industry as strategic partner in Asia and Europe,” said Alessandro Biasci, Technical Expert at Huawei.“ We are pleased to further advance our mission and participate in ELISA, which will allow us to combine our experience in the Linux kernel development and knowledge in safety and security to bring Linux to safety-critical applications.”

“Edge computing extends enterprise software from the datacenter and cloud to a myriad of operational and embedded technology footprints that interact with the physical world, such as connected vehicles and manufacturing equipment,” said Chris Wright, Chief Technical Officer at Red Hat. “A common open source software platform across these locations simplifies and accelerates solution development, while supporting functional safety’s end goal of reducing the risk of physical injury. Red Hat recognizes the importance of establishing functional safety evidence and certifications for Linux, backed by a rich platform and vibrant ecosystem for safety-related applications. We are excited to bring our twenty-seven years of Linux expertise to the ELISA community’s work.”

For more information about ELISA, visit https://elisa.tech/.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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By Marco Fioretti

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a binary software format that all browsers can run directly, safely and at near-native speeds, on any operating system (OS). Its biggest promise, however, is to eventually work in the same way everywhere, from IoT devices and edge servers, to mobile devices and traditional desktops. This post introduces the main interface that should make this happen. The next post in this series will describe some of the already available, real-world implementations and applications of the same interface.

What is portability, again?

To be safe and portable, software code needs, as a minimum: 

1. guarantees that users and programs can do only what they actually have the right to do, and only do it without creating problems to other programs or users
2. standard, platform-independent methods to declare and apply those guarantees

Traditionally, these services are provided by libraries of “system calls” for each language, that is functions with which a software program can ask its host OS to perform some low-level, or sensitive task. When those libraries follow standards like POSIX, any compiler can automatically combine them with the source code, to produce a binary file that can run on some combination of OSes and processors.

The next level: BINARY compatibility

System calls only make source code portable across platforms. As useful as they are, they still force developers to generate platform-specific executable files, all too often from more or less different combinations of source code.

WebAssembly instead aims to get to the next level: use any language you want, then compile it once, to produce one binary file that will just run, securely, in any environment that recognizes WebAssembly. 

What Wasm does not need to work outside browsers

Since WebAssembly already “compiles once” for all major browsers, the easiest way to expand its reach may seem to create, for every target environment, a full virtual machine (runtime) that provides everything a Wasm module expects from Firefox or Chrome.

Work like that however would be really complex, and above all simply unnecessary, if not impossible, in many cases (e.g. on IoT devices). Besides, there are better ways to secure Wasm modules than dumping them in one-size-fits-all sandboxes as browsers do today.

The solution? A virtual operating system and runtime

Fully portable Wasm modules cannot happen until, to give one practical example, accesses to webcams or websites can be written only with system calls that generate platform-dependent machine code.

Consequently, the most practical way to have such modules, from any programming language, seems to be that of the WebAssembly System interface (WASI) project: write and compile code for only one, obviously virtual, but complete operating system.

On one hand WASI gives to all the developers of Wasm runtimes one single OS to emulate. On the other, WASI gives to all programming languages one set of system calls to talk to that same OS.

In this way, even if you loaded it on ten different platforms, a binary Wasm module calling a certain WASI function would still get – from the runtime that launched it – a different binary object every time. But since all those objects would interact with that single Wasm module in exactly the same way, it would not matter!

This approach would work also in the first use case of WebAssembly, that is with the JavaScript virtual machines inside web browsers. To run Wasm modules that use WASI calls, those machines should only load the JavaScript versions of the corresponding libraries.

This OS-level emulation is also more secure than simple sandboxing. With WASI, any runtime can implement different versions of each system call – with different security privileges – as long as they all follow the specification. Then that runtime could place every instance of every Wasm module it launches into a separate sandbox, containing only the smallest, and least privileged combination of functions that that specific instance really needs.

This “principle of least privilege”, or “capability-based security model“, is everywhere in WASI. A WASI runtime can pass into a sandbox an instance of the “open” system call that is only capable of opening the specific files, or folders, that were pre-selected by the runtime itself. This is a more robust, much more granular control on what programs can do than it would be possible with traditional file permissions, or even with chroot systems.

Coding-wise, functions for things like basic management of files, folders, network connections or time are needed by almost any program. Therefore the corresponding WASI interfaces are designed as similar as possible to their POSIX equivalents, and all packaged into one “wasi-core” module, that every WASI-compliant runtime must contain.

A version of the libc standard C library, rewritten usi wasi-core functions, is already available and, according to its developers, already “sufficiently stable and usable for many purposes”. 

All the other virtual interfaces that WASI includes, or will include over time, are standardized and packaged as separate modules,  without forcing any runtime to support all of them. In the next article we will see how some of these WASI components are already used today.

The post WASI, Bringing WebAssembly Way Beyond Browsers appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.

Recently, the Linux Foundation Events team sent out a survey to past attendees of all events from 2018 through 2021 to get their feedback on how they feel about virtual events and gauge their thoughts on returning to in-person events. We sent the survey to 69,000 people and received 972 responses. 

The enclosed PDF document summarizes the results of that survey. Click on the embedded image to see the page advance controls.

LF-Events-surveyApril2021

Ultimately the good news here is that a healthy number of people feel comfortable traveling this year for events, especially domestically in the US. The results also show that about 1/4 of respondents like virtual events, and the vast majority of people who told us that they had attended in-person events before — another reason to keep a hybrid format moving forward.

The post What we learned from our survey about returning to in-person events appeared first on Linux Foundation.

So, you’ve chosen to pursue a career in computer science and information technology – congratulations! Technology careers not only continue to be some of the fastest growing today, but also some of the most lucrative. Unlike many traditional careers, there are multiple paths to becoming a successful IT professional. 

What credentials do I need to start an IT career?

While certain technology careers, such as research and academia, require a computer science degree, most do not. Employers in the tech industry are typically more concerned with ensuring you have the required skills to carry out the responsibilities of a given role. 

What you need is a credential that demonstrates that you possess the practical skills to be successful; independently verifiable certifications are the best way to accomplish this. This is especially true when you are just starting out and do not have prior work experience. 

We recommend the Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate (LFCA) as a starting point. This respected certification demonstrates expertise and skills in fundamental information technology functions, especially in cloud computing, which is something that has not traditionally been included in entry-level certifications, but has become an essential skill regardless of what further specialization you may pursue.

How do I prepare for the LFCA?

The LFCA tests basic knowledge of fundamental IT concepts. It’s good to keep in mind which topics will be covered on the exam so you know how to prepare. The domains tested on the LFCA, and their scoring weight on the exam, are:

• Linux Fundamentals – 20%
• System Administration Fundamentals – 20%
• Cloud Computing Fundamentals – 20%
• Security Fundamentals – 16%
• DevOps Fundamentals – 16%
• Supporting Applications and Developers – 8%

Of course if you are completely new to the industry, no one expects you to be able to pass this exam without spending some time preparing. Linux Foundation Training & Certification offers a range of free resources that can help. These include free online courses covering the topics on the exam, guides, the exam handbook and more. We recommend taking advantage of these and the countless tutorials, video lessons, how-to guides, forums and more available across the internet to build your entry-level IT knowledge. 

I’ve passed the LFCA exam, now what?

Generally, LFCA alone should be sufficient to qualify for many entry-level jobs in the technology industry, such as a junior system administrator, IT support engineer, junior DevOps engineer, and more. It’s not a bad idea to try to jump into the industry at this point and get some experience.

If you’ve already been working in IT for a while, or you want to aim for a higher level position right off the bat, you will want to consider more advanced certifications to help you move up the ladder. Our 2020 Open Source Jobs Report found the majority of hiring managers prioritize candidates with relevant certifications, and 74% are even paying for their own employees to take certification exams, up from 55% only two years earlier, showing how essential these credentials are. 

We’ve developed a roadmap that shows how coupling an LFCA with more advanced certifications can lead to some of the hottest jobs in technology today. Once you have determined your career goal (if you aren’t sure, take our career quiz for inspiration!), this roadmap shows which certifications from across various providers can help you achieve it. 

Download full size version

How many certifications do I really need?

This is a difficult question to answer and really varies depending on the specific job and its roles and responsibilities. No one needs every certification on this roadmap, but you may benefit from holding two or three depending on your goals. Look at job listings, talk to colleagues and others in the industry with more experience, read forums, etc. to learn as much as you can about what has worked for others and what specific jobs or companies may require. 

The most important thing is to set a goal, learn, gain experience, and find ways to demonstrate your abilities. Certifications are one piece of the puzzle and can have a positive impact on your career success when viewed as a component of overall learning and upskilling. 

Want to learn more? See our full certification catalog to dig into what is involved in each Linux Foundation certification, and suggested learning paths to get started!

The post Charting the Path to a Successful IT Career appeared first on Linux Foundation – Training.