eLxr Pro for Aerospace,
Defense, and Government

Building on more than four decades of edge and embedded technology leadership, eLxr is a Linux distribution created expressly for mission-critical applications, from cloud deployments to the intelligent edge.

eLxr Pro^™ adds long-term commercial support from Wind River^® to serve eLxr users’ needs.

When they choose eLxr Pro, program managers can readily comply with Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA) requirements for aerospace and defense use cases spanning the cloud-to-edge continuum.

The U.S. Department of Defense has mandated MOSA as a technical and business acquisition strategy for new systems. Previously, systems integrators and prime contractors designed bespoke systems with custom hardware and software that were difficult to upgrade and locked agencies to a vendor for the life of the program.

With MOSA, the goals are to reduce costs and avoid vendor lock-in by:

• Supporting open standards
• Designing a modular architecture for upgradability
• Using industry-standard interfaces for interoperability
• Certifying standards conformance

As an upstream-first, Debian-based Linux distribution, eLxr Pro eases the reuse of intellectual property, integrates with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware platforms, and scales from enterprise cloud to far-edge workloads. It has a modern systems architecture, including native support for Kubernetes and lightweight K3s containers to ensure robust system updatability.

Department of Defense enterprise systems have strict hosting platform requirements for high-performance computing, scalable operations, security, and analytics support. Ongoing monitoring and timely remediation for common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) are essential security and maintenance components.

Historically, program managers struggled to find platforms that met all their needs. They made trade-offs, especially in supportability and timely priority defect resolution. Trade-offs are no longer necessary.

eLxr Pro delivers a high-performance and cloud-ready platform for application hosting. Cloud-native and container support deliver workload portability, so applications can be reused from the enterprise to the far edge. eLxr Pro provides access to Wind River’s CVE remediation services led by a dedicated Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), accompanied by ongoing threat monitoring, timely fixes with upstream contributions, and proactive security alerts.

Command and control systems must be reliable, resilient, and secure. They must scale to meet a wide range of deployment strategies. New systems must conform to open acquisition strategies such as MOSA.

However, older platforms often don’t meet today’s system requirements. Nor do they conform to MOSA standards for open architectures, industry standards, or modularity.

eLxr Pro provides the critical features that command and control systems require: predictable execution, reliable processing, high availability, redundancy, robust error handling, fewer packages for reduced attack surface, and strong access controls. And it delivers these capabilities without compromising on MOSA principles of no vendor lock-in, broad hardware compatibility, and comprehensive support for industry standards.

Presidential Executive Order 14028 set a new directive for the implementation of secure software supply chains to ensure the integrity and safety of software products the government uses. For example, vendors must conform to the NIST SP 800-218 standard for a Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF). Wind River adopted the Wind River Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL), which is aligned with NIST 800-218 principles, thus conforming to this presidential mandate.

The National Security Agency recommends vendors provide a software bill of materials (SBOM) to verify the provenance of software components as part of the Cybersecurity Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) strategy, and a growing number of Department of Defense entities require one. Wind River delivers a complete SBOM with eLxr Pro.