Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems

What Hacker News says

1. foundry27Feb 2024
   Late reply, I know, but I would highly recommend skimming through “Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems” by Chris Hobbs. I think it does a good job at getting people thinking about how they can start adopting a safety mindset for their projects, what techniques are applicable, and what common pitfalls are.
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2. rgautoAug 2022
   As others have mentioned start with identifing the relevant functional safety standards for your industry. IEC 61508-3 and the annexes, whilst very verbose, is basically the textbook for safety development.

   Pro tip, standards can be hard to find and expensive but you can rent or buy them cheaply from the Latvian Standards website (https://www.lvs.lv/), most are harmonised and exactly the same as IEC or ISO parent standards, just with an LVS cover sheet.

   This book ,Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems by Chris Hobbs gives a great overview of safety software development in general and the key standards, I found it easy to read.

   https://www.routledge.com/Embedded-Software-Development-for-...

   On a practical note if using C or C++ get familiar with commonly used language subsets such as MISRA (https://www.misra.org.uk) or CERT C, again which is more relevant will depend on industry.

   Gimpel's PC-Lint is a commonly used static analyser for MISRA compliance, and you can try with it on their website (https://gimpel.com/demo.html), I haven't come across a free tool complete checker but you can do a lot with clang and GCC.

   Some mention of Rust here but I think that would be a hard language to get through a certification process due to the limited options for qualified tools. That said there is work being done there, https://ferrous-systems.com/ferrocene

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3. pjmlpFeb 2021
   Yep, here some very good books about it, specially relevant given the main subject.

   "Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK"

   https://www.amazon.com/Building-High-Integrity-Applications-...

   "Building Parallel, Embedded, and Real-Time Applications with Ada"

   https://www.amazon.com/Building-Parallel-Embedded-Real-Time-...

   "Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems"

   https://www.amazon.com/Embedded-Software-Development-Safety-...

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4. saha68May 2024
   In an era increasingly dominated by software and hardware integrations, ensuring the safety and reliability of these systems is paramount. This project, inspired by Chris Hobbs's seminal work, "Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems," aims to address a significant gap in the availability of robust, open-source Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) tools. Despite the critical role of FTA in assessing system vulnerabilities and predicting failure points, the lack of accessible tools has pushed many towards expensive commercial solutions. Our project, the Open-Source Fault Tree Analysis (OSFTA) tool, is designed to provide a user-friendly, cross-platform solution that separates the calculation engine from the visual interface, thereby simplifying the integration into developers' workflows and enhancing the reliability testing of safety-critical systems.
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5. blubJul 2018
   To clarify (as a safety hobbyist) why this is a problem:

   * consumer hardware does not normally fulfil automotive safety requirements. It could for instance go into thermal shutdown or into a degraded mode if the temperature is too high. Additionally, there is no HW redundancy, I assume that if any of the HW components of the smartphone fail, the system cannot continue to maintain its safety properties.

   * Android is a consumer OS, designed for consumer workloads. A real-time, safety certified OS like INTEGRITY, ThreadX, Nucleus etc should be typically used for such workloads.

   * The safety-relevant software running on top of the OS is developed with specific toolchains and using specific programming languages. Some requirements [1] for a language used in safety-critical context are defined behaviour, explicit dependability support (e.g. design by contract), predictable timing, suitability for static verification, significant field use, strong typing (not necessarily static typing!), feasibility to restrict the language to a subset (e.g. MISRA, JSF, etc).

   One of the most popular languages for such software is C, which is not safe and doesn't fulfil several of the above criteria. This is mitigated through tooling, processes, code generation, design validation & verification and so on.

   [1]: Taken from Embedded Software Development for Safety-Critical Systems, Hobbs. Interestingly the author would personally choose D or Rust for safety-critical development with the condition of having enough confidence in the compilers.

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