WEBVTT

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Welcome back, the next talk will be
Jan Kiszka

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on Getting more Debian into our
civil infrastructure.

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Thank you Michael.

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So my name is Jan Kiszka,

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you may not know me, I'm not a Debian
Developer, not a Debian Maintainer.

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I'm just an upstream hacker.

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I'm working for Siemens

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and part of the Linux team there
for now 10 years actually,

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more than 10 years.

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We are supporting our business units
in getting Linux into the products successfully

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for that long time, even longer actually.

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Today, I'm representing a collaborative
project that has some relationship

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with Debian, and more soon.

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First of all, maybe a surprise to some
of you,

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our civilization is heavily running on Linux
and you may now think about

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this kind of devices where some kind of
Linux inside,

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or you may think of the cloud servers
running Linux inside.

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But actually, this is about devices closer
to us.

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In all our infrastructure,

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there are control systems, there are
management systems included

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and many many of them run Linux inside.

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Maybe if you are traveling with Deutsche
Bahn to this event these days,

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there was some Linux system on the train
as well,

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as they were on the ???,
so on the control side.

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Energy generation.

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Power plants, they are also run with Linux

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in very interesting ways, in positive ways

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Industry automation, the factories, they
have control systems inside

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and quite a few are running Linux inside.

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And also other systems like health care,
diagnostic systems.

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These big balls up there, they're magnetic
resonance imaging systems,

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they're running on Linux for over
a decade now.

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Building automation, not at home but in
the professional building area.

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Actually, as I said, the train systems are
going to be more on Debian soon.

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We have Debian for quite a while in
power generation.

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"We", in this case, Siemens.

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We have the box underneath,
on the third row,

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the industrial switch there is running
Debian.

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And the health care device is still
on Ubuntu, but soon will be Debian as well.

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Just to give some examples.

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These are the areas where we, as a group,
and we, as Siemens, are active.

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But there are some problems with this.

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Just take an example from a railway
system.

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Usually, this kind of devices installation,
they have a lifetime

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of 25, 30 years.

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It used to be quite simple with these
old devices,

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simple in the sense that it was mechanic,
it was pretty robust

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I was once told that one of these locking
systems,

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they were basically left in a box out there
for 50 years and no one entered the ???

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No one touched the whole thing for 50 years

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These times are a little bit over.

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Nowadays, we have more electronic systems
in these systems

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and they contain of course software.

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What does it mean?

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Just to give you an idea, how this kind
of development looks like in this domain.

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So ???

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development takes quite a long time
until the product is ready,

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3 to 5 years.

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Then, in the railway domain, it's mostly
about customizing the systems

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for specific installations of the railway
systems,

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not only in Europe, they are kind of messy
regarding the differences.


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So you have specific requirements of the
customer, the railway operators

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to adjust these systems for their needs.

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And you see by then,

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after 5 years already, a Debian version
would be out of maintenance and

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if you add an other year, you can start
over again.

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So, in the development time, you may
change still the system

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but later on, it's getting hard to change
the system ???

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because then the interesting parts start
in this domain, not only in this domain,

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that's safety and security assessment and
approval for these systems.

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And that also takes time.

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For example, in Germany, you go for the
Eisenbahn ???

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and you ask to get a permission to run
that train on the track

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and if they say "Mmh, not happy with it",
you do it over again

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and it takes time

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and if you change something in the
system, it becomes interesting

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because some of these certification
aspects become invalid,

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you have to redo it.

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And then of course, these trains on
the installation,

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the have a long life as I mentioned
before.

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So how do you deal with this in
an electronic device and

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in software-driven devices over
this long phase?

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That's our challenge

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and just one example and there are
more in this area.

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At the same time, what we see now is
these fancy buzzwords

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from cloud business entering
our conservative, slowly moving domain.

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We talk about IoT, industrial IoT, so
connected devices.

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We talk about edge computing, it means
getting the power of the cloud

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to the device in the field, closer to
where the real things happen.

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So, networking becomes a topic.

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In the past, you basically built a system,
you locked it up physically

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you never touched it again, except
the customer complains that

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there were some bug inside.

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These days, the customer asks us to
do a frequent update.

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And actually the customers ???
ask for this.

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So you have to have some security
maintenance concept in this

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which means regular updates, regular fixes

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and that is of course ???
for this kind of doing the way you have

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slow running and long running
support cycles.

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To summarize, there's a very long time
we have to maintain our devices in the field

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and so far, this was mostly done
individually.

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So each company, and sometimes quite
frequently also inside the company,

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each product group, development ???
did it individually.

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So everyone was having their own kernel,
everyone was having their own base system,

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it was easy to build up so it should be
easy to maintain.

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Of course it's not.

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This was one thing, one important thing.

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And then, of course, we not always are
completely happy

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with what the free software gives us.

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There are some needs to make things
more robust,

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to make things more secure, reliable.

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So we have to work with these components
and improve them, mostly upstream,

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and that, of course, is not a challenge
we have to address in this area.

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And catch up with a trend coming in from
the service space on the cloud space.

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So with this challenge…

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it was the point where we, in this case,
a number of big users of

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industrial open source systems,

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came together and created a new
collaborative project.

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That's what you do in the open source
area.

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This project is called Civil Infrastructure
Platform.

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It's under the umbrella of the Linux
Foundation,

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there are many projects of the Linux
Foundation you may have seen,

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but most of them are more in the area
of cloud computing

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or in the area of media.

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Automotive computing, this one is actually
even more conservative than the other ones

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and it's also comparably small.

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Our goal is to build this open source
base layer for these application scenarios

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based on free software, based on Linux.

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We started two years ago.

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That's basically our structure, to give
you an idea.

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Member companies, the 3 on the top are
founding platinum companies,

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Hitachi, Toshiba and Siemens.

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We have Codethink and Plat'Home
on board,

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we had them on board for the first time
as well.

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Renesas joined us and just recently also
Moxa.

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So if you compare this with other
collaborative projects,

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it's a pretty small one, comparatively
small one,

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so our budget is also limited.

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It's still decent enough, but, well,
we are growing.

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And based on this budget, we have
some developers being paid,

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Ben is paid this way, you will see
later on why.

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And we have people working from
the companies in the communities

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and we are ramping up on working with
communities

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to improve the base layers for our needs.

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Everything is open source, we have
a GitLab repo as well and

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you can look up there what's going on there.

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So, the main areas of activities where
we are working on right now.

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4 areas.

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Kernel maintenance,

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we started with declaring one kernel as
the CIP kernel to have

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an extended support phase for this kernel
of 10 years.

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This is what we're aiming for, which is
feasible already

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for some enterprise distros
in a specific area

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but here we are talking about an industrial
area, an embedded area

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so there is some challenge.

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I'm saying 10 years, there's sometimes
written 15 years,

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we will see after 10 years if we follow
on to this.

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Along with this, of course, comes the need
for real time support.

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Currently, it's a separated branch, but
it's going to be integrated eventually

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to have the PREEMPT_RT branch 
??? doing this.

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As I mentioned before, Ben is currently
our 4.4 CIP kernel maintainer.

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This is the core, basically where we
started activities.

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We continued in extending this on
test infrastructure,

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so we invested a bit in improving on
??? infrastructure,

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we are now ramping up an internal
??? just to enable

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the kernel testing of course.