Design And Realization Of The IMA Software Platform Based On LINUX

Along with the development of the aviation industry, avionics system also gradually developed into a large system with extremely epic scales and extremely complicated structure which contains numerous subsystems. In order to reduce the manufacturing costs and shorten the development cycle, integration and modulization have become a big trend in the development of the avionics system. IMA (Integrated Modular Avionics) places the subsystems into the uniform hardware platform and then integrates them in the form of software. The essence of the integration and modulization is using software instead of hardware because of the flexibility of software. In this new architecture, the software platform takes over all of the hardware devices and each subsystem becomes the application software running on the software platform. Each subsystem also can make more flexible and rich communication and interaction through the software platform. This architecture fundamentally changes the lack of the traditional federated avionics architecture and reduces the costs of avionics system.The software platform is the foundation of the IMA system. ARINC653 Supplement 1, which is formulated by the ARINC Corporation of the United States, has become the factual standard of the avionics software platform. For represent, the VxWorks 653 Platform which is developed by Wind River Corporation in the United States is a typical embedded real-time operating system which strictly follow ARINC 653 standard. But its price, which is more than $300, 000, is too high. In addition, its nuclear technology is close. If using it as our main integrated modular avionics software platform, the cost is too high and we can master independent intellectual property rights. Linux kernel is a free and open operating system kernel, which has been widely used in the embedded system field. However, its performance of real time and security is poor. For this reason, few people have applied it to the avionics.Based on the previous works, this paper completes the following works: First, it improves the Linux kernel using the virtualization technology; Second, it transplants Linux to the PowerPC platform; Third, it researches ARINC 653 standard; Fourth, it tests the IMA platform designed by the paper. The improved Linux kernel conforms to the ARINC 653 standard and supports the feature of partition and real time. The final research result is the software platform with the core of Linux kernel for the IMA platform. This paper chooses the IAESS (Integrated Airplane Environment Surveillance System) as the test case. The test results show that the partitioning feature provided by the software platform can effectively improve the performance of security. Additionally, it has perfect real-time performance and guarantee that the system can response the external events timely.