DDC-I, a leading supplier of safety-critical operating systems and tools, today announced an in-flight capable file system for safety-critical avionics applications requiring high-performance random read/write access. Utilising the popular exFAT file system for data portability on and off the Avionics device, the Deos™ Volume Management System (DVMS) supports single-core and multicore SafeMC™ operation. Additionally, DVMS offers flexible APIs including ARINC-653 Part 2 and POSIX style interfaces, and it is verified to DO-178C Design Assurance Level A (DAL A). The low-latency, XML-configurable file system also features a Media Abstraction Layer (MAL) that decouples media device specifics, supports mixed DAL application access with support for DMA at DAL A, maintains time partitioning, and is available with both power-fail-safe journaling and lossless compression.

“DVMS and the exFAT file system, with DO-178C verification evidence to DAL A, provides effortless mobility for in-flight safety critical data on/off the avionics platform to Windows and Linux based workstations,” said Greg Rose, vice president of marketing and product management at DDC-I. “The Deos RTOS with its SafeMC technology, DVMS with exFAT, and our comprehensive OpenArbor development tools provide a turnkey avionics software development and deployment solution for systems that require high performance multicore operation and data portability.”

DVMS, adaptable through XML configuration files, was developed as a user space DO-178C DAL-A shared library that allows file operations within the time and space partition of the calling application. The DVMS utilises the exFAT format, a standard file system format for high-capacity memory devices, that enables data to be easily transferred on or off Deos systems through removable media to Linux, Windows and other workstations.

DVMS supports single core, multicore, and multiple concurrent partition access to the file system (re-entrant operation). Each user partition can own one or more DVMS partitions. The DVMS execution time is assigned to the calling application. Each DVMS partition, or volume, may contain one or more files, with DVMS handling mutual exclusion for access to the volumes. The DVMS libraries utilise a Media Abstraction Layer (MAL) that makes it hardware media agnostic. The MALs are available for RAM Disk, a RAW interface, NAND/NOR flash, SATA, and CompactFlash and/or can be modified for customer specific storage media. DMVS is available for Arm, PowerPC and X86 processors.

DVMS features an optional journaling library in which file system data structures (metadata) as well as the file data itself are written to a temporary, but power-cycle-preserved area before committing them to their proper location in the storage device. DVMS also features an optional compression library, a port of the popular zlib lossless data compression library that enables compression/decompression of files on a per volume basis.