LynuxWorks™, Inc and Twin Oaks Computing, Inc. announced today their partnership to deliver Twin Oaks Computings’ CoreDX Data Distribution Service (DDS) communication middleware on LynuxWorks’ LynxOS®-178 safety-critical embedded real-time operating system (RTOS). Together, LynuxWorks and Twin Oaks Computing’s open-standards based solution is in alignment with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™) Technical Standards, enabling applications to be even more portable and reusable than ever before for the airborne computing environment used by the U.S. Army, Navy and other military branches.
The FACE Technical Standards provide guidelines for creating a common operating environment to support applications across multiple Department of Defense avionics systems. The standard is designed to enhance the U.S. military aviation community’s ability to address issues of limited software reuse and accelerate and enhance war fighter capabilities, as well as enabling the community to take advantage of new technologies more rapidly and affordably. The FACE Reference Architecture specifies an infrastructure that provides a common interface for Operating System Services, I/O Services, Platform-specific Services, Transport Services, and Portable Components resulting in applications that may be easily shared and re-used between different air platforms.
“The current FACE Operating System APIs are heavily POSIX®-compliant, which plays well into LynuxWorks’ rich history of POSIX-compliant software,” stated Robert Day, VP of Marketing for LynuxWorks, Inc. “LynxOS-178, the only time- and space-partitioned RTOS that has been awarded the FAA Reusable Software Component (RSC) certification and targets both the Intel® x86 and PowerPC® platforms, was quickly modified to enable over 340 APIs in alignment with the newly approved FACE Technical Standards.”
The FACE Technical Standards also provide guidelines for creating a Data Distribution Service (DDS) based on the Object Management Group (OMG) standard that provides a messaging paradigm for the Transport Services Segment. Twin Oaks Computings’ CoreDX DDS is an implementation of the FACE DDS Standard that allows application communication and re-use across multiple Department of Defense avionics systems. CoreDX DDS meets all DDS requirements laid out in the FACE Reference Architecture and provides all of the benefits of the DDS technology, including:
- Flexible architectures
- Open-standards based interoperability
- Tools for fault-tolerant systems
- Data history and persistence for dynamic classes of information
- Reliable and best-effort transports
- CoreDX DDS provides all these features in an extremely small and safety-certifiable footprint for resource-constrained systems.
LynuxWorks and Twin Oaks Computing last week conducted a demonstration of the CoreDX DDS Shapes Generator running on the DO-178B-certified LynxOS-178 operating system at the FACE Air Force Technical Interchange Meeting and Exposition held in Fairborn, Ohio.
