Speakers
Description
Description/Motivation
As Linux continues to be deployed in systems with varying criticality constraints, the need for consistent linkage between requirements, code, and tests becomes increasingly important at the higher assurance levels. Establishing such traceability can improve development and testing efficiency, supports necessary analysis, and reduces long‑term maintenance risks.
This MC addresses key challenges in expectation management, documentation, testing, and artifact sharing within the Linux kernel ecosystem. While tests are commonly contributed alongside code, the underlying requirements they validate are typically not documented in a structured manner. This creates significant “tribal knowledge” within subsystems, leading to technical debt when maintainers stop working on subsystems or subsystem expertise is lost in other ways.
Given the feedback from last year's "Safe Systems with Linux" miniconference[1], we are pivoting away from the original guidance in 2024 of publicly documenting the kernel design in the code, and focusing on expressing the requirements and traceability as side car data structures. This makes the information machine‑readable, maintainable, and scalable without inhibiting kernel development velocity.
Building on the 2025 discussions and the progress made over the past year, the goal of this MC is to gather wider input from maintainers and developers across different subsystems on the proposed approach and its practical adoption in upstream workflows.
Potential Topics
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Technical Debt Reduction
How capturing expected behavior and design intent as structured requirements enables maintainers to validate functionality during refactoring (e.g., language transitions such as C→Rust) and supports onboarding of new contributors. -
Requirements-Driven Testing
How linking requirements to specific tests and code paths can increase test efficiency, improve coverage understanding, and allow automated validation of expected behavior. -
Semantic Aspects of Kernel Requirements
How to document expected kernel behavior while accounting for design constraints, architectural dependencies, and interactions between subsystems. -
Progress on Linux Kernel Requirements Framework
How the SPDX‑based template for low-level requirements is evolving, what has been learned from early pilots, and how broader adoption as sidecar metadata could be enabled. -
Practical Implementation Challenges
How to balance detailed requirements documentation with the realities of fast‑paced kernel development, and what workflows or structures can minimize friction. -
Required tools for automation
How tooling can generate, validate, and track requirements, tests, and other work products, increasing dependability and reducing manual effort throughout kernel development. -
Connecting with Other Kernel Quality Initiatives
How the requirements approach can integrate with existing kernel quality, testing, and sustainability initiatives, and where collaboration can reduce duplication and improve adoption. -
Industry Adoption
How safety-critical industries are beginning to leverage these developments for certification and compliance purposes.
How their safety engineers can participate in contributing formalized requirements to the kernel and providing linkage. -
Requirements as an Education Tool
How linux kernel documentation can mine the requirements, and help new contributors understand kernel functionality and design intent and attract new upstream developers
Objective
The MC aims to bring together kernel maintainers, developers, safety architects, and industry stakeholders to advance the adoption of structured requirements and traceability practices to complement the Linux kernel existing development workflows. It will focus on aligning documentation, testing, and tooling in a coherent workflow, and addressing remaining technical and organizational challenges in building dependable and safety‑relevant systems with Linux.
Potential Participants
- Gabrielle Paoloni
- Chuck Wolber
- Luigi Pellecchia
- Alessandro Carminati
- Paul McKenney
- Julia Lawall
- Sasha Levin
- Steve Rostedt
- Thomas Gleixner
- Shuah Khan
- Gustavo Padovan
- Wolfram Sang (Renesas BSP)
- Kate Stewart
- Philipp Ahmann
- Nicole Pappler
References
[1] LPC 2025 Safe Systems with Linux MC: https://lpc.events/event/19/sessions/221/#20251212