Re: [Help] About Xen ASIL-B status at present (Appreciate)

[Stefano Stabellini <stefano.stabellini@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Lei,

I am very happy to hear about your interest in Xen and ASIL-B!

Xen has already been taken and safety-certified by downstreams in the
past on their own. The work we are doing as part of the FuSa SIG is to
enable third parties like yourselves to safety-certify Xen more easily
and at a lower cost. We are not going to start a certification process
ourselves as it typically is an end-to-end activity that includes the
entire software stack and even the hardware. The goal is to provide the
tools, artifacts, and the code to make it easier for others to go
through the certification process, ASIL-B in particular.

We have already identified a minimal Xen configuration for safety.

One of the activities we are undertaking is about MISRA-C compliance.
An initial analysis was done by ResilTech showing very promising results
(few violations.) Now, we have almost completed the "tailoring" process
of defining the MISRA-C rules that apply. For most of them, we have
identified a static analysis tool to check them (typically cppcheck). In
terms of MISRA-C compliance, I suspect that we'll be able to add MISRA-C
automatic checks and also start addressing MISRA-C violations in the
codebase in the 4.16 release cycle (the current release cycle). It is
fair to say that it will take more than 1 release to bring Xen to full
MISRA-C compliance but we'll get closer and closer over time.

In terms of requirements, we are going to use Doxygen and Sphynx to
create the infrastructure to host requirements documents in xen.git and
also maintain the linking between requirements, code, and tests. We are
adding the Doxygen/Sphynx infrastructure to xen.git right now. The
requirements documents still need to be written although we have a
couple of templates.

Let me know if you have any questions. If you'd like to discuss we could
have a one-off FuSa SIG call at a timezone more convenient for you. It
would be great to collaborate with you on this! We could go faster
together.

Cheers,

Stefano


On Tue, 25 May 2021, Stefano Stabellini wrote:
> Dear Sir/Madam,
> 
> 
> I am system software engineer from Samsung, with Xen hypervisor development 
> experience for Samsung's Telemetics products.
> At our side, one coming Telemetics product requires ASIL-B for Hypervisor and 
> Xen is one option. So we are really curious about your great
> work!
> I've searched for your Xen ASIL-B status and schedule from Internet and 
> fusa-docs but still have some questions.
> So I send this mail for help. I apologize if this mail bothers you.
> 
>  
> 
> My questions:
> - What is your Xen ASIL-B status at present? Have you defined the minimal Xen 
> functions? Started the ASIL certification process or not?
> Started code development or not?
> - What is the (estimated) schedule for (1) starting ASIL certification 
> process (if not), (2) getting ASIL-B certification?
> We want to check if we can catch your schedule and so to develop Xen based on 
> your work (an open source ASIL-B hypervisor ever).
> 
>  
> 
> Appreciate if you can check any of these questions. Thank you!
> 
>  
> 
> Best Regards,