Reports & White Papers

In collaboration with Arm, we've published a white paper documenting the process of integrating Arm's Software Test Libraries into Arm Cortex-A application processor systems. The assignment involved integrating Arm's STLs into an open source Linux environment.

The document covers diagnostic coverage, integration complexity, software licensing, compatibility, and performance overhead.

Codethink authors:

• Ben Dooks, Codethink Fellow
• Dickon Hood, Senior Software Engineer
• Roan Richmond, Software Engineer

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Over the last several decades, the scale and complexity of critical software has increased by orders of magnitude. In cars for example, we have seen a tremendous growth from simple microcontrollers running a few thousand lines of code, to multi-function ECUs, advanced infotainment and driver assist capabilities; systems in a typical vehicle may involve over 100 million lines of code.

The international standards that are relevant to safety were mainly established long before this massive expansion took place. IEC 61508 and ISO 26262, for example, mainly describe approaches that are viable for less complex systems based on microcontroller architectures, but difficult or impossible to apply for modern systems involving multi-core microprocessors.

Many software and safety professionals recognise this challenge, and teams around the world are exploring how to assure safety in highly complex systems, by extending and improving upon existing methods, or by devising new ones.

Read our full report to learn more about the principles we believe should be applied to safety critical systems.

Authors:

• Paul Sherwood, CEO
• Paul Albertella, Consultant

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Major players like Apple, Intel, ARM, IBM, Oracle, HP, Samsung, Cisco, Facebook and Google are all contributors to open source projects. Even Microsoft is making its solutions work with Linux and has open sourced core technologies such as the .NET framework.

In this white paper, we consider the use of open source from the perspective of companies and teams working to bring new or updated products or services to market and to maintain them over extended production lifetimes. We draw on Codethink’s experience across various organisations: IP and silicon vendors, electronics companies, system integrators, OEMs, ISVs, OSVs, service providers and industry initiatives.

Author:

• Paul Sherwood, CEO

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Productivity and reliability for embedded systems software development projects is too low. As a result, technology industries are failing to deliver new software for new and existing devices fast enough:

1. Projects are delivered late, or with features missing

2. Fixing security vulnerabilities takes too long, or proves to be impossible

This gap creates an economic imperative for major organisations to exploit Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions. However, engineering understanding and competence levels are so low that projects still run late or fail, even with free access to billions of dollars of proven software.

This document outlines our thinking about the problem, the environment we are in, our company, our approach to solving the problem, and the future.

Author:

• Paul Sherwood, CEO

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