Re: [Xen-devel] Xen and safety certification, Minutes of the meeting on Apr 4th

[Jarvis Roach <Jarvis.Roach@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Hi all,
> 
> adding a few more people who are/may be interested in safety certification,
> including committers (because item 1 would have an impact). Specifically:
> Rich Persaud, Paul Luperto, Jonathan Daugherty and Denys Balatsko.
> 
> There are a few loose ends and updates from other/similar related threads
> that we should pull into this thread:
> 
> a) AGL Whitepaper
> This is out as far as I can tell
> See
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HpYzClh0nDEocsUHb17X0DxiehsAb
> CgyWE-P2Wk_RNU/edit#
> Thank you to Rich for driving this and to all the contributors from the Xen
> Community
> 
> Related to this is the following item from the original minutes
> > AGL will select 2 hypervisors out of the list. Artem has already an
> > out-of-the-box solution for AGL. Artem will chase up and make sure
> > that Xen will be one of the two.
> 
> b) Genivi AMM Hypervisor Workshop, Apr 19 Artem and me will be
> speaking on various Xen related projects. I will send a draft PDF to this list
> later this week.
> Slots are short: 10 minutes + questions each slot See
> https://at.projects.genivi.org/wiki/display/DIRO/Hypervisor+Workshop+Te
> am
> 
> c) Xen Specific Automotive Whitepaper
> This was discussed during a) and I think it would be relatively easy to pull
> something together. It would be good if someone else, but me could lead
> this. We have a lot of information already, but more ground-work on safety
> certification may help. Would there be a volunteer driving this? I could be
> used as a vehicle to move some of the items discussed in the minutes
> along.
> 
> d) I also created
> https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Category:Safety_Certification to start
> pulling material relevant to safety and context for it into one place.
> It's a little crude at this point in time and I expect this document to evolve
> and split into smaller parts.
> It would be good, if someone on this list could go over
> https://wiki.xenproject.org/wiki/Category:Safety_Certification#Automotive
> _Requirements and map the requirements to functionality we already have.
> This could then feed into c.
> 
> Any takers?
> 
> > Artem suggested to write a whitepaper about Xen real-time capabilities.
> > Stefano volunteered to help.
> I believe we have some gaps with regards to real-time requirements and
> that paper is aiming to highlight these.
> @Artem: maybe this would be a suitable topic for the developer summit
> (amongst others) As a reminder: the CfP for the summit closes next Friday
> 

One of my engineers has highlighted the need to move Xen to use preemptive 
locks (similar to what was done with the Linux RT patch updates) before it can 
be considered hard real-time. Right now we've been pitching it as soft 
real-time.

>
> > I contacted Lars (CC'ed) who volunteered to help.
> I am volunteering to act as a program/project manager for this activity. In
> particular to bootstrap.
> 
> I think the only practicable way to make progress in this area, is to set up
> some mechanism which allow us to make progress towards the goal of
> making it easier and cheaper to build safety certified variants of Xen. As a
> side-effect of this process we should get data, to scope out the scale of the
> problem further, that should enable getting more vendors interested.
> 
> > The main topic of the meeting was certifications for Xen on ARM. The
> > gap analysis document, mentioned in the previous call, is copyrighted.
> > It might not be possible to relicense it. Regardless of the document,
> > we started discussing the major work items and next steps.
> 
> @Stefano: Thanks for driving this discussion I re-ordered some of the items,
> to make it more palatable
> 
> > 2) Create a subset of functions that need to go through certifications
> > Next step: create a small Kconfig. We could use the Renesas Rcar as
> > reference. We need a discussion about the features we need, for
> > example real-time schedulers, do we need them or not?
> 

Identifying this subset is very important. My recommendation would be to 
identify the very smallest subset to start with that supports a single, high 
value use case, which I would suggest is consolidation of Linux and real-time 
applications with mixed criticality, but not necessarily shared/PV I/O, onto a 
single processing cluster. Identifying the highest reasonable safety 
criticality to support would also be very helpful. 

At the Xen level, you might get away with just the null scheduler if VMs are 
pinned to their own cores (and jitter caused by contention on the bus and in 
the cache is acceptable). However, to do CAST-32a type scheduling (effectively 
time slicing the SoC between your VMs), an updated ARINC-653 scheduler would be 
needed. 

>
> @Stefano agreed to drive this.
> The minimal configuration does impact 1 and 2, which is why I moved this
> first.
> 
> We should probably agree a basic process: aka
> * Measure baseline size in KSLOC
> * Remove some feature
> * Measure reduction in KSLOC
> And record the data somewhere
> 
> > 1) Requirements to the code, a subset of MISRA for ASIL B Next step:
> > get more information about requirements and publish it to xen-devel.
> 
> I see a few problems here:
> 
> * The MISCRA 2012 spec has to be bought and it is rather big (100's of
> pages):
> so, I don't think it is practical to work from the spec
> 
> * Some coding style patterns will likely be perceived as odd and
> unreasonable by community members: as some common code would be
> affected we cannot treat this in isolation say on ARM only. Although it is
> recognized that some of the coding style patterns may not make sense,
> compliance to MISRA is necessary and cannot normally be discussed away.
> 
> * PRQA has set up an environment and initial MISRA compliance report for
> a Xen on ARM build
> ** The question is what (if anything) can be shared publicly
> ** The other open question is whether we can come to some sort of longer
> term agreement between the Xen Project and PRQA to use their tools
> ** As an aside, what PRQA have done would need to reflect what we do in
> step 2 is. We also want to minimize the work for PRQA: in other words, it
> has to be very simple to enable the minimal config coming out of task 2
> such that PRQA can
> ** As far as I recall 90% of all MISRA violations come down to around 70
> issues. A large number are in tools
> ** Also, I believe that MISRA compliance tools will likely lead to a large
> amount of false positives, due to the distributed nature of Xen: process
> boundaries, kernel/user space boundaries, etc. would all lead to false
> positives, which somehow have to be managed.
> 
> ACTION => Lars to follow up with Paul Luperto from PRQA
> 
> * An approach that may be manageable would be to look at the most
> common MISRA violations and work backwards from there.
> ** This would make the problem more manageable and mean people
> wouldn't have to read a long spec
> ** Discussing a small set of issues, would give us a sense of whether/what
> type of disagreements there are and how we resolve them.
> ** We should focus prioritize based on:
> a) Address/discuss the most frequently occurring issues first
> b) Address/discuss issues in common code first
> 
> At the very least (and for now in absence of the capability to check
> compliance), I would need someone who has access to MISRA compliance
> tools, to drive such an effort.
> 
> > 3) Understand how to address dom0. FreeRTOS Dom0 sounds like a good
> > solution.
> > Next step: reach out to Dornerworks and/or others that worked with
> > FreeRTOS on Xen before. Figure out whether FreeRTOS is actually a
> > suitable solution and what needs to be done to run FreeRTOS as Dom0.
> 
> Some things to check at this stage:
> a) I believe there is a safety certified version of FreeRTOS - I could not 
> find
> much, except for https://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS-
> Plus/Safety_Critical_Certified/SafeRTOS-Safety-Critical-Certification.shtml -
> which describes SafeRTOS a commercial safety certified FreeRTOS and
> (mostly) API compliant version of FreeRTOS. Or am I missing something
> here?
> b) There is a DomU capable version from Galois (Jonathan Docherty CC'ed) -
> I don't know whether others also have such versions

I ported the version of FreeRTOS that Xilinx distributes with their SDK to run 
as a domU on the ZUS+ in 2016 and round tripped the change set back to Richard 
Barry. 
I've also heard interest in running RTEMS as a guest OS.

Since I do not think that a previously certified OS will be available for free, 
I see 3 general approaches wrt dom0:
1) Find and certify an open source OS. My guess is this will not be Linux due 
to code base size. POSIX support a plus.
2) Use a commercially available, previously certified OS for dom0. DW ported 
VxWorks to run on Xen in 2017 and uc/OS-III in 2016.
3) Go with a dom0-less solution; bootloader starts up the necessary VMs based 
on a static configuration.

The XL toolstack in its current form will likely cause cert issues and will 
probably need to be stripped down and/or rewritten.
Bootloader (U-Boot, GRUB, or whatever) will also need to be certified.

> c) There is a POXIX wrapper, which may be needed, but it is unclear what
> this would do to the FreeRTOS footprint
> d) In other words, what we would have to do is to investigate whether it is
> possible to build to a Dom0 capable FreeRTOS
> 
> I see several ways of approaching this:
> a) A vendor (or groups of vendors) on this list steps up
> b) We go initially for a lower bar: aka we try and scope out and cost the
> creation of a Dom0 capable FreeRTOS and then look at how the work can
> get funded
> 
> A very good starting point would be to get a list of parties that are
> interested in having and using a FreeRTOS based Dom0 (regardless of how
> we get there). A show of hands would be good.

DW is interested in participating with exploring ways to solve the dom0 problem 
(be it FreeRTOS or other approaches).

> Some insights from anyone on the FreeRTOS/SafeRTOS relationship and
> politics would be good also. Unless there is a route from FreeRTOS
> upstream to the certified version, someone in our eco-system would have
> to safety certify FreeRTOS (which may not be such a big deal given the fairly
> small size of FreeRTOS).
>

This link helps explains the relationship between FreeRTOS and SafeRTOS:
        
https://www.highintegritysystems.com/safertos/upgrade-from-freertos-to-safertos/

>
> > 4) Create artifacts, such as docs, fault analysis, prove fault
> > tolerance, safety management docs, development processes.
> > Next step: we need to bring in a company, a certification body, to
> > guide us through the process.
> 
> We have companies such as Dornerworks on this list which are experienced
> with safety certification on Xen for some safety standards: it is not clear to
> me how much of this is transferable to automotive.
> 

Papers have shown that there is a lot of overlap between the artifacts and 
processes defined in different safety standards. 

However, someone with more experience in automotive safety should speak to the 
concern of non-determinism/jitter in that market. Aviation certification 
authorities are practically rabid about it, and you have to go to great lengths 
to satisfy them (disable interrupts, flush cache between partitions, prove that 
silicon vendor's secret features are all disabled, etc) which might be overkill 
for automotive.

>
> Here my understanding is that we need a certification partner like TÜV,
> MIRA or a company like Dornerworks who already have experience with
> Xen. By working with a partner experienced in certification, the overall cost
> of certification would be significantly reduced. The elephant in the room is
> funding and a business model (aka all the items listed in
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HpYzClh0nDEocsUHb17X0DxiehsAb
> CgyWE-P2Wk_RNU/edit section 4.1). The reality is that organisations such
> as TÜV, MIRA, Dornerworks, ... will need to be paid by someone. Which, I
> think we need to park for now.
> 

I wouldn't leave it parked too long. The issues of funding and remuneration 
will delay/derail progress more than all of the technical challenges combined.

>
> What I think are sensible goals for now are
> a) Establish a list of potential partners and start establishing contacts - 
> such
> conversations would need to be led by a vendor, otherwise it will go
> nowhere. What would be good though is to have a shared (but possibly
> private) repository of how these conversations have gone.
> b) Otherwise focus on tasks 1-3 which deal with some issues listed in
> https://www.slideshare.net/xen_com_mgr/art-certification, which is still
> very valid
> c) Engage/work with with other groups (AGL, Genivi, Linaro) who are also
> looking at this problem
> 
> It may be worth in the mid-term to consider some sort of pilot around a
> small portion of the Xen codebase: the aim would be to gather data that
> helps establish what can be done in a collaborative FOSS environment.
> 
> Feedback/views are very welcome
> 
> Regards
> Lars
> 
> 

Cheers!
-Jarvis

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