SYSGO’s PikeOS 5.0 simplifies development and certification of safety and security-critical systems

SYSGO unveiled the latest version 5.0 of its real-time operating system PikeOS for safety and security critical systems. Key new features include expanded certification at the highest levels against all current safety and security standards, improved tools to accelerate development and improve user friendliness, and optimized support for multi-core systems.

In addition, the number of partitions supported by the integrated hypervisor or separation kernel has been increased to 255. Partitions are used by PikeOS to strictly separate multiple guest operating systems and applications, often of different criticality, while still allowing communication through explicitly configured channels.

With these innovations, PikeOS 5.0 represents a platform on which systems for the highest certification levels such as DAL-A in avionics, SIL-4 for railway applications or ASIL-D in the automotive industry can be implemented. The POSIX® GuestOS has also been revised, preparing PikeOS 5.0 for use in AUTOSAR adaptive projects. SYSGO will make corresponding certification kits available over the course of the year.

The certification of systems and applications will be simplified and accelerated by the new qualified configuration tools such as VMIT Compiler and ROM Image Builder of PikeOS 5.0. These qualified tools in the integrated, Eclipse-based development environment CODEO eliminate the need for time-consuming validation of the generated binaries. In addition, any subset of the configuration can be exported as a reusable component, simplifying team development.

Last but not least, the migration from PikeOS 4.2 to 5.0 has been simplified by wizards in CODEO, tutorials and documentation.

Multi-core Support
PikeOS 5.0 has also been optimized for multi-core support, especially with regard to certifiable systems. For example, the new version guarantees a significant reduction in interference between applications running on different processor cores through very granular kernel locking mechanisms.

This way, PikeOS 5.0 ensures that the requirements of the Cast-32A paper are met, which has been drafted by the Certification Authorities Software Team for the use of multi-core processors in certifiable systems.

Safety and Security
PikeOS was developed from the ground up to ensure the IT security of embedded applications in addition to functional safety. The hypervisor of the current version is the only one on the market with EAL 3+ certification according to Common Criteria, and PikeOS 5.x will also be certified accordingly or higher. SYSGO thus enables the use of the same software for safety and security certifiable systems.