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Comment by ComputerGuru | Hacker News Reader

The seatback device is a consumer electronic that can (and should) be experimented with, updated, upgraded, and replaced regularly. I don't care what OS it is using today or how fancy it looks - that has nothing to do with the first part of your question, which should (and fortunately usually is) altogether separate.

The off-the-shelf answer today is a variant of QNX or VxWorks. No one gets fired for picking those.

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I thought most seatbacks ran Linux?

For more critical applications, Boeing is using Ada on Linux atop AMD's new embedded CPUs, which have no closed firmware (to ensure auditability).

Sadly, Boeings culture rot has led to some poor design decisions recently.

I am yet to see any Linux distribution certified for high integrity computing.

Usually Linux always runs in a VM sandbox on top of such OSes, like Green Hills INTEGRITY OS.

pjmlp is right: life-critical software must be certified to high levels of DO-178C standard. That's always either custom software or some RTOS's that are certified already. Linux couldn't pass DO-178C's high levels, if at all. The INTEGRITY-178B page has the docs and processes listed in bottom right if you want to see them. That's for prior standard, though. New one looks similar.

https://www.ghs.com/products/safety_critical/integrity-do-17...

They probably run Linux in the less-critical stuff on the plane. At one point, they were running some apps on Windows and Linux simultaneously as a reliability technique. I don't know if they still do that.

Yes, but I wasn't talking about the seatback devices ;)

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