It's all about the evidence

An important distinction that gets drilled into people new to safety critical systems and certification of said systems is the difference between "certified" and "certification evidence." When certifying a safety critical system to a very strict standard such as DO-178B, the system as a whole is certified not individual components such as operating systems or middleware. Verification and validation of safety critical systems is very expensive and time consuming. However, to greatly reduce the burden of testing and test reporting,  the use of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware and software is required. However, COTS hardware and software must adhere to the same strict requirements for verification and validation as the systems they are being used for. In order for VxWorks DO-178B to be used, we must provide certification evidence along with the product - providing proof that these strict standards were followed. For the customer, this means a huge cost savings because they spend much less time proving the air-worthiness of COTS components and spend the time verifying and validating their own applications.

Our recent update to the VxWorks DO-178B platform is a case in point. Wind River took the initiative to provide DO-178B certification evidence for the board support package for a COTS Single Board Computer (SBC) from Curtiss-Wright Controls - the DMV/SVME-183. This is a popular board for avionics systems and by providing certification evidence for this combination is a great time and money saver for customers. 

Also of interest in this new release is the addition of support for Intel Architecture IA-32 and Power Architecture e600 processors.