Flight Software Dictionary
We’re frequently finding new terms, acronyms, initialisms and more that confuse people trying to figure out the flight software world. Hopefully, this is a resource that will help in some small way. Please let us know if we’ve missed something.
Flight Software Dictionary
O
OS
Short for “Operating System”. The Core Flight Software must be installed on top of an Operating System (e.g. Linux) but that’s not true for all flight software.
OSAL
In cFS, it’s short for “Operating System Abstraction Layer”. This is the lowest layer in the stack of three layers that make up the Core Flight System. It translates commands between your operating system and the Core Flight Executive layer. The OSAL has already been written for you if you use Linux, RTEMS, VxWorks, and POSIX operating systems. Some people have written an OSAL variant for FreeRTOS, but that has not been publicly released.
The GitHub link to is here: https://github.com/nasa/osal
NASA’s cFS GitHub includes it as well: https://github.com/nasa/cFS