The safety domain has traditionally used selected
processors and dedicated operating systems. With life-cycles
of processors dramatically shortening and the transition to
multicore being almost universal the safety industry needs to
address this changes at the foundations of its strategy. This
requires that the community takes advantage of and makes
use of the current technologies available in the safety domain.
One of the ways is the use of off-the-shelf operating systems.
To effectively use complex hardware/software in safety-related
systems, a demonstration that such a system is sufficient to ensure
the safety function is required. We propose in our work the use
of inherent diversity as an architectural means to protect such
systems against systematic residual faults. We also seek to define
a process to verify and quantify the level of safety of systems
based on inherent diversity. The inherent diversity approach has
a promising potential to play a role in enabling complex software,
like the GNU/Linux operating system, for safety-related systems.