Civilisation Runs On Linux

Jonni Bidwell always suspected Linux would save the world. Industry experts Yoshitake Kobayashi and Urs Gleim all but confirmed his hunch…

The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) is a Linux Foundation initiative. It aims to establish a base layer of industrial-grade software to power critical services such as energy, water, transportation and communications – the lifeblood of today’s civilisation.

Many of these projects run on open source software, and many more will do so in the future. Yet it’s completely unfeasible to update the software running these things every five years (the current lifespan of LTS distros), and many of these systems are looking at life-spans beyond 50 years. So the CIP introduces the idea of a super long-term support (SLTS) kernel.

Linux Format’s Jonni Bidwell caught up with Toshiba’s Yoshi Kobayashi and Urs Gleim, head of the Central Smart Embedded Systems Group at Siemens AG at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit in Prague in October 2017. There, he got the lowdown on how the CIP hopes to keep its kernel and base layer “industrial-grade”. Since then, there have been a number of key developments, so we’ve summarised those, too.

Linux Format: Linux is running in all kinds of places, and lives depend on some of those applications. What is the Civil Infrastructure Platform and how is it going to help civilisation going forward?

Yoshi Kobayashi (YK) and Urs Gleim: (UG): Yes, early on in our presentation we have a slide entitled Our Civilization is Run by Linux, and it’s not an exaggeration. Things like railway infrastructure, healthcare and industrial automation, these all have longrunning systems. We’re talking between 10 and 40 years, maybe even longer.