Designing a future airborne capability environment (FACE) hypervisor for safety and security

A partitioning environment is one of the components of an avionics architecture aligned with the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE™). In this paper, we explore the design of a hypervisor to provide the partitioning specified in the FACE Technical Standard. The FACE Consortium is focused on military aviation software, with a dual emphasis on technical standards and business acquisition strategies. We provide an overview of the history and purpose of FACE, then briefly examine previous open avionics initiatives. Our hypervisor extends the Xen open source hypervisor to support the ARINC 653 partitioning standard. Adding the Application Program Interface for the ARINC 653 standard is relatively straightforward because the underlying architectural concepts align well (with a few interesting challenges). Our current work is to expand our hypervisor technology to provide the required interfaces under FACE safety and security profiles. We discuss the current state of the project, examining technical and business aspects of open source software. We conclude with a roadmap for our hypervisor technology to reach conformance with the FACE Technical Standard and eventually achieve flight and security certification.