Re: Safety-Critical Software Design

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From	Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>
Newsgroups	comp.arch.embedded
Subject	Re: Safety-Critical Software Design
Date	Sat, 16 Jul 2016 23:10:13 -0700
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Randy Yates <yates@digitalsignallabs.com> writes:
> Are there any formal requirements, guidelines, or recommendations for
> software which will run in a safety-critical environment in the United
> States or world-wide?

This is a reasonable place to start reading, and has some useful references:

   http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/high-assurance-floss.html

> My gut and experience tells me there should NEVER be software DIRECTLY
> controlling signals of devices that might lead to human injury. Rather,
> such devices should be controlled by discrete hardware, perhaps as
> complex as an FPGA.

Like an FPGA running a softcore microprocessor? ;-)

Yes there are microprocessors intended for safety-critical applications.
They have things like dual cpu's running in lockstep, predictable
realtime response, ECC memory all the way through, etc.  Some of the ARM
Cortex-R series are rated for this.  

  http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launchpad/launchpads-hercules.html

has some cheap experimentation kits.

There are some Haskell DSL's for generating realtime C code with
various error-prone issues handled for you automatically:

  https://github.com/Copilot-Language
  https://github.com/Copilot-Language/atom_for_copilot

I've played with Atom and ImPROVE a little bit but not the rest of Copilot.

You might also want to look at SPARK/Ada.

Thread

Safety-Critical Software Design Randy Yates <yates@digitalsignallabs.com> - 2016-07-17 00:57 -0400
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> - 2016-07-16 23:10 -0700
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> - 2016-07-17 09:16 +0300
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Reinhardt Behm <rbehm@hushmail.com> - 2016-07-17 14:38 +0800
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design upsidedown@downunder.com - 2016-07-17 10:37 +0300
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2016-07-17 03:09 -0700
    Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Don Y <blockedofcourse@foo.invalid> - 2016-07-17 03:32 -0700
      Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid> - 2016-07-17 22:49 +0300
      Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Les Cargill <lcargill99@comcast.com> - 2016-07-26 11:20 -0500
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Tim Wescott <tim@seemywebsite.com> - 2016-07-17 20:51 -0500
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design FreeRTOS info <noemail@given.com> - 2016-07-21 10:33 +0100
  Re: Safety-Critical Software Design Les Cargill <lcargill99@comcast.com> - 2016-07-26 11:17 -0500

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