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Comment by mbustamanter | Hacker News Reader

As an occasional general aviation pilot (I found this HOWTO after trying to find tools to aid in flight plan calculations), I think it would be great if we took it a step further and make a full-fledged Linux avionics system, but it seems unlikely [0]. And Garmin will likely not be replaced in a dozen years.

[0] https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/36853/do-safety...

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The creator of Asterisk (the linux-based PBX) has been building a modern modular avionics system which I believe is Linux-based. From what I can tell they have plans for certification.

https://www.avilution.com/

I would love to have something like this accessible and hackable just for my simming.

The new octavia device looks really nice but it is pricey for what it is.

Are you talking about this device?

https://www.octavi.net/

Yes. Thanks for the spell correct.

The link you posted doesn’t make it seem unlikely inasmuch as it completely pillories even the notion of using Linux for avionics on both technical and economic merits, completely counter to your claim that it would “be great”. So why would it be great?

In practice most pilots use an iPad app for flight planning and navigation. No technical reason why open source hardware/software could be used for that if it had good UX (which is pretty uncommon in the Linux desktop space)

I think you and the link in OP are talking about two different things. The link talks about "safety-critical avionics" and answers mention that they use proprietary RTOS. Certainly, anything that can be done on iPad could be done on Linux, and Linux is quite common for non-real time embedded things.

These answers seem to be quite out of date, as the aerospace industry (most notably SpaceX) has been using Linux as part of their rocket control systems for quite a while now.

That is suicidal. Linux is not a real time operating system.

Bare metal seems more appropriate than a GPOS.

a linux avionics system isn't terribly interesting -- what do you think a g1000 is...

open source, however, could be interesting

Do you have a reference for the G1000 running Linux? Thanks.

I don't think it does or it would be listed here: https://developer.garmin.com/open-source/linux/

I've seen a kernel panic on G1000 once, does not feel like a Linux (unless they also heavily modified the panic handler)

Ooo, what did it look like? A Mach kernel oops (aka "just start painting text from the top-left"), a BSOD (more structured), a dialog box over the top, or...?

Also what info was printed? An inscrutable Guru Meditation, a register dump, or...?

Just idly fascinated to figure out how much info would be dumped by a piece of avionics running in end-user production mode.

lol yeah, I was very sad that I forgot to take a pic but it's black and white, text on top-left and it's just a register dump.

I went on a bit of a rabbithole trying to look for firmware downloads for the G1000 to run `strings` on but sadly they're not publicly available anywhere.

But I'm very happy to be able to say that you don't need to be sad you didn't get a photo anymore because I found https://mooneyspace.com/topic/21333-g1000-pfd-start-up-error... :D

No amount of quote-googling got me any further though, which was why I went firmware hunting. Now at least I have a good conversation starter for anyone who looks like they might have a dealer account next time I'm at a hangar though...

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