The PreCertification Kit for Operating Systems in Safety Domains

In present-day, software is taking over functionalities traditionally implemented in hardware, therefore the software architecture has been more complex and large. In such software architecture is common to be present an Operating System (OS). However, in safety domains (e.g., avionic, railway) it is mandatory to be compliant with a safety standard (e.g., DO178B), this means that evidence on the software life cycle of the software components, and therefore also of the OS, should be available. Those evidences that represent the certification package of the OS might not be available for commercial or Open Source OSs, hence their certification requires a complementary creation of evidence to serve as certification inputs. The certification process is costly, thus the system integrator must carefully select the candidate OS. Hence, it would be of great value to support the system integrator in selecting the more suitable OS to certify. In this position paper, we introduce our future research on the development of a Precertification kit (PK), that is, a framework that supports the evaluation of OS in what concerns certification requirements. Also, the PK is a valuable tool that can be integrated in the development toolchain for the implementation of safer and higher quality OS and, provides additional evidences to use for the certification package.