A portable ARINC 653 standard interface

The ARINC 653 specification defines the functionality that an operating system (OS) must guarantee to enforce robust spatial and temporal partitioning as well as an avionics application programming interface for the system. The standard application interface - the ARINC 653 application executive (APEX) - is defined as a set of software services a compliant OS must provide to avionics application developers. The ARINC 653 specification defines the interfaces and the behavior of the APEX but leaves implementation details to OS vendors. This paper describes an OS independent design approach of a portable APEX interface. POSIX, as a programming interface available on a wide range of modern OS, will be used to implement the APEX layer. This way the standardization of the APEX is taken a step further: not only the definition of services is standardized but also its interface to the underlying OS. Therefore, the APEX operation does not depend on a particular OS but relies on a well defined set of standardized components.