Dear Gab, Daniel,

The presentation in the ELISA workshop was interesting and informative. Thanks again for that.

Some more questions are attached below for my clarity and to see if it helps for the further evolution towards a more general-purpose design.

The Requirements Decomposition:

1. Here, I have the impression that the top level safety requirements look a bit broader than the requirements specially for the kernel (e.g.: for the 1^st requirement, to my understanding, the programming of the watchdog timeout is initiated by the safety application). By introducing the approach of having the monitor in the kernel to relax some kernel modules from having to be safety compliant, I think we expected that the safety requirement decomposition would happen within the scope of kernel. If that is the case, I think the requirement decomposition should probably be performed based on some safety requirements at the kernel level (effectively concerning the VFS / Watchdog Driver / etc. as a whole), and it may possibly be worded like “The kernel (modules) shall ensure the watchdog control to follow the requests from the safety application” or something like that, which is to eliminate the specifics which are actually executed by the application.

2. For the decomposed requirements on the right side, I would wish the correctness of the watchdog timeout setting to be part of the monitoring, because that is part of the intended function of the related kernel modules and can otherwise cause a safety problem if violated. And that may drive my next question (which might be touched a little bit during the workshop presentation) which is how can the proposed RVM based monitoring be scaled / extended to support the monitoring of numerical characteristics of the kernel in addition to the finite enumerative states. The watchdog timeout setting (as one straight forward numerical characteristic) is naturally less dynamic, but how feasible (most difficult aspect might be to model such complicated kernel behavior in the formal notations with respect to lots of factors which have influences over that numerical kernel behavior, and especially the concern of integrity of those influencing factors as the inputs of the in-kernel monitor) is it to scale / extend the RVM to cover the rest of the kernel (as far as used in the typical safety critical applications) in terms of numerical characteristics if the kernel would possibly exhibit and have safety implications?

High Level Failure Mode Analysis / Failure Mode 1 – Failure in the VFS

About the fault detection measure, the safety application retrieves an internal state of the in-kernel monitor which appears that the safety application acts partially as the monitor of the in-kernel monitor (typically in case of kernel error), which is probably supportive in this case because maybe no other means are available to ensure the runtime correctness of the RVM, although the RVM itself can be engineered to a high integrity during its construction phase due to the use of formal notations and tools (which can be qualified offline). However, that brings the architecting question which is how feasible could the safety application (not necessarily the one for the Tell-Tale use case, but could be other possible applications) be developed with some level of the knowledge about the in-kernel monitor and the achievable diagnostic coverage of the monitoring at the application level against the in-kernel monitor the complexity of which can be linear to the kernel functions to be monitored.

Thank you.

张海鹏 Zhang Haipeng

)  +86 13817693438

*  zhanghaipeng02@...

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