Linux in Aerospace: A Personal Journey
From the early days of Linux, I was a fan of this innovative, open-source Operating System (OS). I appreciated it as a hobbyist, helping me run Linux at home. I appreciated it as an educator, helping my computer engineering students walk with Linux through OS concepts. However, as a professional working in the safety-critical domain of aerospace, I wondered: could Linux fly?
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My journey with Linux had its roots in the 1980s before Linus Torvalds introduced his new OS to the world in 1991. During my undergraduate degree in the 1980s, my engineering program had some labs equipped with the relatively recent IBM Personal Computer (PC). The machines were amazing, but my ability to command their power was somewhat limited by the OS, which was the Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS). When I reached my third year, I gained access to a Sun Workstation running SunOS, a variant of Unix. I quickly learned to appreciate the rich menagerie of shell commands, the power of combining them with redirection such as pipes, and the aesthetics of the fledgling X-Windows GUI.
I first heard about Linux in graduate school in the early 1990s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My doctoral thesis was on Input/Output (I/O) performance, especially on multiprocessor systems. My research analyzed and quantified I/O performance on OSs such as SunOS, SGI IRIX, DEC OSF/1, HP-UX, and Linux. One key finding of my research was that I/O performance could be impacted by the interference caused by unrelated transactions contending for shared resources within a multi-processor system. The magnitude of the impact was heavily dependent not only on the computing hardware architecture but also on the architecture of the OS. Interference could even occur on a uni-processor where independent processes had I/O tasks clustered in time.