LYNX SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES
LYNX SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGIES
Every day, millions of people worldwide are touched by products that rely on Lynx Software Technologies software—from Internet and phone communications, to airline flight-control systems, office automation and medical devices. Lynx Software Technologies software provides the hidden intelligence that empowers, protects and secures our modern world.
It’s no secret to the people who build embedded applications like these that Lynx Software Technologies operating systems offer unmatched levels of performance, stability, and security for their projects.
In 1988, Lynx Software Technologies (formerly LynuxWorks and Lynx Real-Time Systems) made history right away with the launch of the LynxOS® real-time operating system (RTOS), offering UNIX® functionality to developers of embedded systems long before embedded Linux® became available.
Today—22 years later—LynxOS is in its fifth generation of reliability, boasts full POSIX® conformance and even symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP). LynxOS has matured over the years and evolved into a complete family of real-time operating systems, each enhanced for specific security and certification needs: LynxOS-178 for critical avionics systems requiring software certification; LynxOS-SE with time and space partitioning; and the LynxSecure separation kernel and embedded hypervisor.
LynxSecure is again making a technological milestone in the company’s history. It is the most full-featured secure virtualization solution on the market, offering support for guest operating systems like Windows®, Linux, Solaris and Chromium, all hosted on the latest multicore processors. The military-grade security that it offers is combined with near-native performance and real-time determinism, meaning no compromise is required when adding security and virtualization to modern client devices and embedded systems.
Our family of real-time operating systems is complemented by our Eclipse-based Luminosity Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
As processor-based embedded systems proliferate, and the functionality of today’s connected devices continues to increase, the amount of embedded software included in the device continues to grow.
As a result, there is an ever-increasing need for reusability and reliability of embedded software and applications. At Lynx Software Technologies, we believe that open standards can be coupled with reliability, safety and security to meet the software needs of the most complex embedded systems.
Our Commitment to Open Standards
“Use of open standards allows our customers to take advantage of open-source and commercial applications to complement their own proprietary applications. By utilizing maximum reuse, they build complex embedded software systems on-time and on-budget.”
From our earliest days, Lynx Software Technologies has conformed to open standards, such as UNIX and POSIX.
Only Lynx Software Technologies’ products provide developers of embedded applications the ability to leverage the reuse of existing code, third-party commercial solutions and open-source applications seamlessly, with unrivaled interoperability and portability among various platforms.
Lynx Software Technologies is active in many of the industry committees and groups that shape and maintain standards—such as OMG (Object Management Group), Open Group Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Consortium, power.org, and eclipse.org. This ensures that our customers’ needs are met by the standards we support, keeping our open systems current as standards evolve.
For our avionics customers, we adhere to the ARINC 653 standard, and we offer a MILS-based separation kernel for our customers demanding the highest levels of security. We utilize the industry-standard Eclipse framework and the open-source projects such as CDT to provide an enterprise-strength open development environment.
This commitment to openness extends to our customer relationships as well. We provide customers with access to source code and engineering resources, as well as the opportunity to participate in discussions of our product direction through our Customer Advisory Board.
Fail-Safe Reliability
Unlike the typical desktop system, many embedded systems run 24 hours a day, seven days a week, maintaining our quality of life and ensuring our safety. The greatest challenge in designing such embedded systems is ensuring the fail-safe operation of these “always on” devices. Lynx Software Technologies’ products have proven their dependability time and again even in the most extreme environments.
Lynx Software Technologies’ operating systems are the most tested in the world—both in the lab and in everyday environments. In addition to our own thorough, in-house testing and verification measures, all Lynx Software Technologies products are submitted to rigorous testing against a wide array of quality standards, including ISO and CMMI.
LynxOS has been at the core of the British national telephone network for more than 10 years without a single failure. Our industry-leading avionics solution, LynxOS-178, has logged more than 500,000 flight hours for one of our leading avionics customers, over a number of airframe platforms in true safety-critical applications.
Ultimate Safety for Safety-Critical Systems
Our LynxOS-178 RTOS remains the only hard real-time operating system certifiable to the DO-178B level A avionics software certification process accepted by both U.S. and European regulators. LynxOS-178 also offers the interoperability benefits of POSIX and support for the ARINC 653 Application Executive (APEX).
Widely deployed in both commercial and military avionics applications, LynxOS-178 offers brick-wall partitioning of applications allowing integrated software systems to coexist on the same hardware platform without compromising system safety. Due to its modular design, in which large segments of the RTOS remain standard regardless of the hardware it runs on, LynxOS-178 is the only operating system to have been awarded a reusable software component (RSC) rating from the FAA. This rating makes it easier for developers of safety-critical systems to transfer the component from one system to another, without recertifi cation. LynxOS-178 is appropriate for—and has been deployed in—non-avionics environments as well and has been used in other safety-critical applications in the automotive, industrial-control, medical and transportation industries.
Security for the Modern World’s Interconnected Systems
“LynxSecure represents the forefront of today’s embedded operating system technology. This hypervisor allows for high-assurance applications to run next to large guest operating systems such as Linux or Windows, giving ultimate flexibility to both our military and general embedded customers.”
Today’s embedded systems require interconnectivity, therefore, the need for increased security. Designing security into embedded systems is not an easy task and requires security from the network, through the application and down to the operating system. For military systems, guidelines and certification requirements ensure that systems are secure, and today’s operating systems need to adhere to them. Security standards such as those defined by Common Criteria have different levels of information assurance (EAL1 to EAL7), with increasingly stringent requirements.
At Lynx Software Technologies, we have been designing our operating systems to help our customers meet whatever security requirement is demanded. Our LynxOS family of operating systems provides open POSIX APIs.
For higher levels of security (up to EAL7), we designed, from the ground up, the LynxSecure separation kernel. LynxSecure is a MILS (multiple independent levels of security) architecture and employs a high-performance hypervisor (HPH). This hypervisor allows multiple applications and multiple operating systems to run on the same hardware system, all in their own secure partitions, operating at their own levels of security.
LynxSecure is small, fast, secure and meets the design requirements for high-assurance systems. The technology is also flexible with the incorporation of the HPH and can be used for other non-secure systems where there is a need to run multiple operating systems in virtualized partitions.
Tools, Support, Services, Training, Partners
Lynx Software Technologies’ operating systems are used by leading companies in a wide array of industries, from aviation and defense to networking and telecom to consumer electronics and industrial automation. Companies including 3Com, Alcatel, Boeing, Ericsson, Hewlett Packard, iRobot, Galileo, Lockheed Martin, Marconi, Mitsubishi, Motorola, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grummun, Rockwell Collins and Xerox have selected Lynx Software Technologies’ products as the basis of hundreds of thousands of projects.
We work with our customers to develop open-standards-based products that are the most reliable, safe and secure in the world. Our customers have grown to rely on our development expertise and our ISO 9001 compliance to bring their innovations to market. Our training and support teams support our customers throughout their products’ extended lifecycles, starting with our catalog of embedded system programming workshops, which allow our customers to get the most from their investment in our products.
Headquartered in San José, California, Lynx Software Technologies, Inc., is a pioneer and proven leader in the embedded software market, and its strict adherence to, and evangelism of, open standards is unique among embedded software vendors.
