OSS + ELC EU 2026

Safety-critical systems in avionics, automotive, and industrial domains increasingly rely on mixed-criticality architectures where workloads of different safety levels share hardware. This talk presents ongoing work to bring functional safety to the upstream Xen hypervisor, composed with Zephyr RTOS and Linux, to meet standards including DO-178C (avionics), ISO 26262 (automotive), and IEC 61508 (industrial).
We walk through concrete upstreamed and published contributions: MISRA C fixes, MPU support in Xen, requirements and architecture specifications, and test specifications. We describe how Xen is validated as a Safety Element out of Context using domain-based tests, fault injection, gdb-based interface testing, fuzzing, platform emulation, Ceedling unit testing, and coverage analysis (line, branch, function, MC/DC).
We also cover efforts to shrink the safety-certifiable codebase through fine-grained hardware configuration, and how Xen enforces freedom from interference between VMs via isolation. We close with opportunities to collaborate with the ELISA and Xen FuSa communities toward an open safety case for open-source systems.