Embedded Linux in a partitioned architecture for aerospace applications

The ARINC 653 specification, defined for aeronautical applications, has the goal of providing a standard interface between a given real-time operating system (RTOS) and the corresponding applications. It also provides robust partitioning, with the final goal of guaranteeing safety and timeliness in mission-critical systems. The interest in ARINC 653 has extended to the aerospace industry, which resulted in the definition of an architecture, compliant with the specification, allowing for operating system heterogeneity. In this paper, we introduce the problem of integrating generic operating systems onto this architecture, and explore the case of GNU/Linux. Adding GNU/Linux allows running existing applications or interpreted scripts without needing to port the application or interpreter to an RTOS. In embedded systems, we have to cope with scarce resources and diverse existent hardware, and a balance between both issues must be reached. For such, we show the genesis of such a solution.