Getting (more) Debian into our civil infrastructure

Talk given by Jan Kiszka at Minidebconf Hamburg 2018
https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2018/miniconf-hamburg/2018-05-20/civil_infrastructure.webm

Welcome back, the next talk will be
Jan Kiszka

on Getting more Debian into our
civil infrastructure.

Thank you Michael.

So my name is Jan Kiszka,

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

I'm just an upstream hacker.

I'm working for Siemens

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

more than 10 years.

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

for that long time, even longer actually.

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

with Debian, and more soon.

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

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

this kind of devices where some kind of
Linux inside,

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

But actually, this is about devices closer
to us.

In all our infrastructure,

there are control systems, there are
management systems included

and many many of them run Linux inside.

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

there was some Linux system on the train
as well,

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

Energy generation.

Power plants, they are also run with Linux

in very interesting ways, in positive ways

Industry automation, the factories, they
have control systems inside

and quite a few are running Linux inside.

And also other systems like health care,
diagnostic systems.

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

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

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

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

We have Debian for quite a while in
power generation.

"We", in this case, Siemens.

We have the box underneath,
on the third row,

the industrial switch there is running
Debian.

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

Just to give some examples.

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

But there are some problems with this.

Just take an example from a railway
system.

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

of 25, 30 years.

It used to be quite simple with these
old devices,

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

I was once told that one of these locking
systems,

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

No one touched the whole thing for 50 years

These times are a little bit over.

Nowadays, we have more electronic systems
in these systems

and they contain of course software.

What does it mean?

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

So ???

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

3 to 5 years.

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

for specific installations of the railway
systems,

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

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

to adjust these systems for their needs.

And you see by then,

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that also takes time.

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

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

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

and it takes time

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

because some of these certification
aspects become invalid,

you have to redo it.

And then of course, these trains on
the installation,

the have a long life as I mentioned
before.

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

in software-driven devices over
this long phase?

That our challenge