Standards are just the start towards software reuse across platforms!

Nearly all the sought-after benefits of open system initiatives in the defense community, including U.S. Army MOSA Transformation Office, U.S. Airforce OMS, U.K. MoD Pyramid, hinge on the ability to reuse system components across platforms of different versions and/or product lines with minimal effort.

More specifically, the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) aims to design systems with highly cohesive, loosely coupled, and severable modules that can be competitively sourced from independent suppliers. As a software development framework for rapidly building comprehensible software systems out of independent application modules

A software component should be able to be inserted into a system with a similar skillset and level of effort needed to insert a VPX card into a chassis. In reality, the effort of porting software across operating system (OS) platforms is more akin to performing a heart transplant surgery than replacing a line card.

That is because while standards describe interfaces of libraries that applications can link into to use operating system services, these interfaces only include descriptions for software that can run in the user application spaces of an operating system. The standards lack descriptions of expected behavior and side effects that can inform real-time and hazard analysis. They also do not account for the system configuration information needed to build, integrate, and configure them to get a comprehensive system to behave correctly. They also do not cover software components that reside in the operating system itself (e.g. drivers and health monitors).

So, this is where we believe the ecosystem that services this category of use cases should be focused. And we have to realize this vision together!

LYNX MOSA.ic™ is designed specifically to deliver on the open architecture vision of MOSA. The LYNX MOSA.ic framework enables platform suppliers and system integrators to partition hardware into Rooms and Passageways for use by rich operating systems like Linux (or Windows®), real-time operating systems and bare metal applications. LYNX MOSA.ic is designed to support 64-bit multicore processors providing hardware support for virtualization.

LYNX MOSA.ic provides a clearer path to multicore safety certification by forgoing the traditionally inherited complexities of a centralized resource management model common to OS and hypervisor designs. The stack of software implementing the resource management is a liability; not only does it add significant cost to the certification effort, but it over-complicates robust partitioning and contributes to the multi-core interference problem.

In providing a simpler foundation for hosting safety-critical applications, LYNX MOSA.ic lowers the cost, time and program risk of multicore certification compared to traditional SMP RTOS approaches.