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Overview

What is Civil Infrastructure Platform™ (CIP™) Project?

"The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) Initiative, hosted by the Linux Foundation and driven by the world's leading manufacturers of civil infrastructure systems, aims at providing a base layer - a set of industrial grade core open source software components, tools and methods to create Linux-based embedded systems that meet the requirements of modern societal infrastructure." (cited from CIP Whitepaper (April 2017) (PDF))

Key features of CIP project

1. Kernel with Super Long-Term Support (SLTS), 10 or more years

Maintaining Linux in industrial and social infrastructure applications presents unique challenges for equipment manufacturers. These machines typically require support for quite a number of years, whereas the maximum Long-Term Support (LTS) Linux maintenance period only runs approximately two years. In addition, industrial-grade software requires high reliability, safety and security, and real-time or near real-time performance.

The CIP community is currently supporting three Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) Linux kernels, based on the Linux Project’s LTS v4.4, v4.19 and v5.10 releases. Each kernel is maintained with security and bug fixes for at least 10 years.

Super Long Term Support Over 10 Years

2. Activities for the Linux kernel with real-time capabilities

"Civil infrastructure industry has high stability, reliability and security standards in order to ensure safety critical systems. A project has been formed to address this reality called "CIP Testing". So far the efforts are focused on testing the CIP kernel. In the future they will be extended to the complete CIP platform. " (cited from CIP Wiki)

Real-Time Linux

3. Provide automated kernel test environment

"Civil infrastructure industry has high stability, reliability and security standards in order to ensure safety critical systems. A project has been formed to address this reality called "CIP Testing". So far the efforts are focused on testing the CIP kernel. In the future they will be extended to the complete CIP platform. " (cited from CIP Wiki)

The CIP project provides a fully automated environment for testing that uses GitLab CI/CD and LAVA. More details can be found on the CIP Wiki.

LAVA is a continuous integration system for deploying operating systems onto physical and virtual hardware for running tests. https://lavasoftware.org/

GitLab is a development platform that integrates many functions including version control, issue tracking, code review, CI/CD, etc. https://gitlab.com/

Renesas Electronics Corporation has joined CIP project as a Platinum member since Feb. 2017

Renesas is contributing to CIP activities thru our development for the Verified Linux Packages for RZ series. Many patches are being submitted to the upstream kernel and backported to the CIP kernels. Also, Renesas is providing an automated test environment for CIP’s reference platforms. CIP kernels are being tested by collaborating with the Kernel CI project on the test firm in our UK office.

Customers can take our Verified Linux Packages with SLTS kernel CIP 4.4, 4.19 and 5.10 from this website and these Verified Linux Packages are ready to run on the reference boards and our partner's boards.