U.S. Navy Turns to Linux to Run Its Drone Fleet

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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It looks like Tux the Penguin is enlisting in the US Navy as an aviator. The Navy has a deal with Raytheon to install Linux to control the Navy’s drone fleet officially known as autonomous flying vehicles in military parlance. The contract is worth close to $28M.

The U.S. military is not new to Linux, and has learned from past problems with less-reliable operating systems.
 
This is going to be a huge problem when the drone motherboards get UEFI and the Navy can't disable Secure Boot. :p They'll have to switch to OSX.
 
This is going to be a huge problem when the drone motherboards get UEFI and the Navy can't disable Secure Boot. :p They'll have to switch to OSX.

Microsoft is requiring that uefi boards for x86 have the ability to disable Secure boot. Its arm where its not required.
 
Microsoft is requiring that uefi boards for x86 have the ability to disable Secure boot. Its arm where its not required.

Well yes, but that's clearly just for this initial revision. Microsoft is plotting to take over the world! :p

In reality though, Microsoft is only one member (a large one, but only one member) if the UEFI and they don't control the organization. Though there are people who are certain there's a conspiracy. I was just poking a little fun at them.

http://www.uefi.org/about/
 
The DoD has been using Linux for awhile now, it's good to see that they are spreading it to vital control systems. Being a Linux guy, I would like to see the US government make Linux a standard for all office. But I know that's not going to happen when big business controls the congress.

one of my favorite Live CD/USB distributions is LPS, it the DoD's portable distribution.
you can find it here if anyone wants to take it for a test drive.
http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm
 
The DoD has been using Linux for awhile now, it's good to see that they are spreading it to vital control systems. Being a Linux guy, I would like to see the US government make Linux a standard for all office. But I know that's not going to happen when big business controls the congress.

one of my favorite Live CD/USB distributions is LPS, it the DoD's portable distribution.
you can find it here if anyone wants to take it for a test drive.
http://www.spi.dod.mil/lipose.htm

Hey, LPS! It's actually a pretty neat little live distro. I wonder if anyone has put it on a traffic analyzer to make sure there isn't any...

bloodshot1.jpg


...going on
 
Somehow I doubt that using Unix/Linux OS's in a critical environment isn't going to resolve programmer errors like the one that caused 'the classic.'

The Yorktown lost control of its propulsion system because its computers were unable to divide by the number zero, the memo said. The Yorktown’s Standard Monitoring Control System administrator entered zero into the data field for the Remote Data Base Manager program. That caused the database to overflow and crash all LAN consoles and miniature remote terminal units, the memo said.

More stupidity.

If you understand computers, you know that a computer normally is immune to the
character of the data it processes,” he wrote in the June U.S. Naval Institute’s
Proceedings Magazine. “Your $2.95 calculator, for example, gives you a zero when you
try to divide a number by zero, and does not stop executing the next set of instructions.
It seems that the computers on the Yorktown were not designed to tolerate such a simple
failure."

He doesn't understand computers either. If you divide by zero, the program can crash if you do not write it correctly (unresolved floating point exception) and the program cascades into other functions. That $2.95 calculator works because the programmer did his damn job. Sadly people don't realize that since, apparently, we're taken for granted.
 
I would have to agree with you night. The first article linked about the drones definitely sounds like there are a bunch of people who don't know enough about computers to really fix the issue. They probably popped XP sp1 discs into their drones and installed the software. Once they got the virus they are probably sitting there running virus scans and thinking those are going to fix the issue.

"Eventually, the technicians had to use a software tool called BCWipe to completely erase the GCS’ internal hard drives. “That meant rebuilding them from scratch” — a time-consuming effort." Made me lol. If they don't have a way to reinstall these things from some type of image, that really tells you that their staff is not up to snuff.

Putting linux on the computers will definitely psuedo help the problem because most of the common viruses won't be able to work. The issue is that if you have staff that is even less educated with linux and grab an off the shelf distro like Ubuntu to install, then once those installs get old and aren't being patched there will be plenty more holes to exploit.
 
True, poorly written software is poorly written software no matter what platform it runs on. However I think it's pretty safe to say there is a lot LESS poorly written software in a typical lightweight Linux distro than in Windows. I know which one I would rather switch on and forget about.
 
There's probably less software in general which means fewer places to screw something up or introduce a bug and fewer functions to check for oversights. Windows is great business and personal computing, but running a drone is something else altogether. Of course, this means you need knowledgable people to develop and maitain systems, but who said it was inexpensive to own a fleet of drones anyway?
 
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