Jun 19, 2018   SOURCE: BusinessWire

AdaCore’s GNAT Pro Supports Lynx Software Technologies’ LynxSecure Separation Kernel Hypervisor on Intel Processors

Avionics Electronics Europe Conference--AdaCore, a trusted provider of software development and verification tools, today announced that customers using the LynxSecure Separation Kernel Hypervisor from Lynx Software Technologies can take advantage of GNAT Pro in a variety of scenarios to maximize their productivity with Ada. Potential use cases include migrating code from PowerPC LynxOS-178 to Intel LynxOS-178 under LynxSecure, writing safe and secure lightweight Bare-Metal LynxSecure Applications in Ada, and running Ada code under guest OSes such as Windows and Linux.

Ada brings many benefits to avionics software developers through higher reliability, increased confidence in an application’s safety and security, and lower verification costs. The language’s strong typing and other compile-time checks detect errors early, when they are least expensive to correct. And Ada’s contract-based programming features (such as subprogram pre- and postconditions) embed low-level requirements in the source code where they can be verified either with run-time checks, or, with appropriate tool support such as from the SPARK Pro technology, through static analysis. These benefits have long been enjoyed by GNAT Pro customers using Lynx Software Technologies’ solutions, and the support for LynxSecure opens up new opportunities for Ada developers. Projects using LynxOS-178 as part of the LynxSecure Safety Bundle can realize system SWaP (Size, Weight and Performance) benefits through safe sub-system consolidation on multi-core processors and, in a DO-178B/C context, save significant certification costs by taking advantage of Reusable Software Component (RSC) artifacts.

“AdaCore and Lynx Software Technologies have a number of important customers developing Ada programs on the LynxOS-178 platform,” stated Jamie Ayre, Commercial Director at AdaCore. “Support for the Intel version will allow them to upgrade to the latest version of the technology and benefit from the advantages the LynxSecure Kernel can bring when building safe and secure multi-core embedded systems.”

“The powerful combination of AdaCore and the LynxSecure Safety Bundle for Intel processors is significantly reducing the time, cost and risk of building and maintaining safe multi-core systems,” said Lee Cresswell, Vice President Sales, Lynx Software Technologies, Inc. “The LynxSecure Safety Bundle supports a smooth transition from federated to integrated modular avionics (IMA), enabling system integrators to leverage modern multi-core hardware to consolidate multiple Line Replaceable Units (LRUs) onto a single platform.”

About AdaCore
Founded in 1994, AdaCore supplies software development and verification tools for mission-critical, safety-critical and security-critical systems. Four flagship products highlight the company’s offerings:

  • The GNAT Pro development environment for Ada, a complete toolset for designing, implementing, and managing applications that demand high reliability and maintainability,
  • The CodePeer advanced static analysis tool, an automatic Ada code reviewer and validator that can detect and eliminate errors both during development and retrospectively on existing software,
  • The SPARK Pro verification environment, a toolset based on formal methods and oriented toward high-assurance systems, and
  • The QGen model-based development tool suite for safety-critical control systems, providing a qualifiable and customizable code generator and static verifier for Simulink® and Stateflow® models, and a model-level debugger.

Over the years customers have used AdaCore products to field and maintain a wide range of critical applications in domains such as commercial avionics, automotive, railway, space, military systems, air traffic management/control, medical devices and financial services. AdaCore has an extensive and growing worldwide customer base; see www.adacore.com/industries for further information.

AdaCore products are open source and come with expert online support provided by the developers themselves. The company has North American headquarters in New York and European headquarters in Paris. www.adacore.com/

About Lynx Software Technologies
Lynx Software Technologies provides advanced high-assurance and safe system development platforms that empower innovative companies to create the safest, most secure systems in the world. Lynx is committed to providing the highest levels of safety and security. LynxOS-178 is an industry proven DO-178C DAL A RTOS that offers the interoperability benefits of POSIX, ARINC-653, and FACE. LynxOS-178 is also the first and only time- and space-partitioned RTOS awarded the FAA Reusable Software Component (RSC), dramatically reducing customer certification costs. LynxOS-178 can also be deployed as a guest on LynxSecure pre-integrated as part of the safety bundle, providing a secure separation kernel and virtualization solution for the development of highly safe and secure multi-core systems. Lynx customers have been deploying GNAT Pro based solutions in the aerospace and defense markets for many years.

About LynxSecure
LynxSecure is a true high assurance separation kernel virtualization technology founded on a unique robust design. Alternative to traditional centralized resource and service oriented designs seen in most operating systems and hypervisors, LynxSecure provides a decentralized approach. One where each guest computing environment is self-sufficient. The autonomy of each guest environment obviates the need for the kernel to provide global services. It is by the nature of the unique distributed autonomous design approach LynxSecure was immune to Intel processor limitations that opened up other systems to the Meltdown threat, where attacker processes/VMs were able to derive kernel and guest private memory as a result of central service oriented kernel designs that required access to all guest memory.