5 ms·

Bandaid fix if I've ever heard of one.

User23 7y ago
My jaw literally dropped. It actually took me a moment to realize I was sitting gape-mouthed reading that. We're talking airplanes here, not some LAMP stack. If this is what we can expect going forward, the Jet Age isn't going to last another 50 years. This kind of software ought to be developed using a tool like TLA+.
- Aloha 7y ago
  We effectively have a front row seat to the sausage making of software development, its not pleasant.
ulfw 7y ago
That describes the whole 50+ years old 737 to it’s core.
burfog 7y ago
It's proper. This is exactly how you do things with life-critical embedded software. You detect when things are crazy, which of course shouldn't happen but nevertheless does, and you react in a way that is hopefully not disastrous. The alternative is to ignore the problem. Sensors go bad. Actuators go bad. Voting hardware goes bad. Message routing goes bad. Even the RAM sometimes goes bad. When the hardware is failing ("specific streams of erroneous flight data") there isn't going to be a reliable solution. You can't even fully enumerate all the possible failures. How could you possibly guess that a message routing chip now flips bit 7 in every angle-of-attack measurement? Boeing's answer is standard: when the values look crazy, stop doing stuff that might make the situation worse.
- Haga 7y ago
  Only embedded guy here. You can't catch them all. Height radiation alone sees to that.
- BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  I suspect your take is correct but I understand the alarm from the previous poster as the way it's worded makes it sound like they'll look just for condition X, Y and Z and _then_ take action versus your explanation which looks for a lot of incoming, bad data and then handles it. This might just be a bad case of people talking past one another.
- tus88 7y ago
  The way I read it they are not detecting malfunctioning sensors, but essentially a computer fault caused by it's inability to deal with erroneous input. Rather than fixing the computer, they are essentially wrapping a great big try/catch around it....good God.
  - comex 7y ago
    That interpretation seems like a stretch to me.
    - selestify 7y ago
      The way it's worded, that's exactly the interpretation that a lot of us in this thread get. If this is not actually the case, they should really word it differently.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        This is the same Bloomberg that reported on the SuperMicro hardware "compromise."
  - raverbashing 7y ago
    > are not detecting malfunctioning sensors Because most of the time you can't. There is no reliable way of knowing when the sensor is lying to you. You might try to reduce the probability of it happening and try to make it warn you (for example, redundancy, etc), but in aviation, even things that have a probability of failure of 10e-6 or even lower must be considered. 0% chance of reading an erroneous value doesn't exist. The computer can deal with suspected erroneous input: it can ignore it. There. That's the standard way.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    But what's erroneous input? A bit is flipped? A .1V increase over 0 makes it a logical 1, when it should be .3V? I mean, this is the domain of computer/electrical engineers in the first place, to prevent these kind of problems. This is what happens when you outsource your critical components to 3rd parties.
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  what happens when things are actually crazy and it causes a crash itself?
- LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  I guess most users dont know that- but the software in parts of your car might be crashprone too.. you just dont realize that- cause the watchdog detects the stall, and resets it..

My jaw literally dropped. It actually took me a moment to realize I was sitting gape-mouthed reading that. We're talking airplanes here, not some LAMP stack. If this is what we can expect going forward, the Jet Age isn't going to last another 50 years. This kind of software ought to be developed using a tool like TLA+.

Aloha 7y ago
We effectively have a front row seat to the sausage making of software development, its not pleasant.

ulfw 7y ago

That describes the whole 50+ years old 737 to it’s core.

burfog 7y ago

It's proper. This is exactly how you do things with life-critical embedded software. You detect when things are crazy, which of course shouldn't happen but nevertheless does, and you react in a way that is hopefully not disastrous. The alternative is to ignore the problem. Sensors go bad. Actuators go bad. Voting hardware goes bad. Message routing goes bad. Even the RAM sometimes goes bad. When the hardware is failing ("specific streams of erroneous flight data") there isn't going to be a reliable solution. You can't even fully enumerate all the possible failures. How could you possibly guess that a message routing chip now flips bit 7 in every angle-of-attack measurement? Boeing's answer is standard: when the values look crazy, stop doing stuff that might make the situation worse.

Haga 7y ago
Only embedded guy here. You can't catch them all. Height radiation alone sees to that.
BinaryIdiot 7y ago
I suspect your take is correct but I understand the alarm from the previous poster as the way it's worded makes it sound like they'll look just for condition X, Y and Z and _then_ take action versus your explanation which looks for a lot of incoming, bad data and then handles it. This might just be a bad case of people talking past one another.
tus88 7y ago
The way I read it they are not detecting malfunctioning sensors, but essentially a computer fault caused by it's inability to deal with erroneous input. Rather than fixing the computer, they are essentially wrapping a great big try/catch around it....good God.
- comex 7y ago
  That interpretation seems like a stretch to me.
  - selestify 7y ago
    The way it's worded, that's exactly the interpretation that a lot of us in this thread get. If this is not actually the case, they should really word it differently.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      This is the same Bloomberg that reported on the SuperMicro hardware "compromise."
- raverbashing 7y ago
  > are not detecting malfunctioning sensors Because most of the time you can't. There is no reliable way of knowing when the sensor is lying to you. You might try to reduce the probability of it happening and try to make it warn you (for example, redundancy, etc), but in aviation, even things that have a probability of failure of 10e-6 or even lower must be considered. 0% chance of reading an erroneous value doesn't exist. The computer can deal with suspected erroneous input: it can ignore it. There. That's the standard way.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  But what's erroneous input? A bit is flipped? A .1V increase over 0 makes it a logical 1, when it should be .3V? I mean, this is the domain of computer/electrical engineers in the first place, to prevent these kind of problems. This is what happens when you outsource your critical components to 3rd parties.
throwaway2048 7y ago
what happens when things are actually crazy and it causes a crash itself?
LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
I guess most users dont know that- but the software in parts of your car might be crashprone too.. you just dont realize that- cause the watchdog detects the stall, and resets it..