Community Announcement October 2020

Hello cFS community!

It has been a busy summer for the cFS team. In May, cFS won NASA's software of the year award. We are grateful to everyone who submitted letters of endorsement and who responded to our cFS user survey.

Thank you for helping to spread cFS throughout the aerospace community, from flagship missions to smallsats, hobby projects, and beyond!

cFS Version Updates

Around July, we officially released cFS-Aquila, "the eagle", which includes cFE 6.7. Aquila updates the OSAL license to Apache 2.0 you can see the rest of the changes in the version description document.

In response to community feedback, we've started referring to new cFS framework releases by a constellation name organized in alphabetical order. We hope this will reduce confusion about cross-component compatibility. Up next is cFS-Bootes, "the herdsman". Bootes contains cFE 6.8 and we tagged the first release candidate in August. Bootes contains mostly bug fixes and the test and release process is well underway.

cFS Caelum Coming Soon!

The big news is cFS-Caelum, "the chisel", which contains breaking changes! Some notable upgrades and changes for Caelum are

• Automated build verification tests of framework requirements,
• Updated traceability, APIs/ICDs in documentation,
• Framework for customization of core services (see nasa/cFE#726),
• Improve consistency of alignment and padding across Command and Telemetry structures, and
• Library query and reporting and Executive Services resource management (see nasa/cFE#28, nasa/cFE#797).

Since Caelum is a major release, expect to see rapid and breaking changes if you are following the "main" branch. We will be removing deprecated code and there is potential for changes in APIs, commands, telemetry, directory structure, etc. The focus of this release is to provide a "certifiable" framework, with a clean, consistent, and portable code base. We expect to tag a release candidate for Caelum around December 2020.

cFS-GSFC Applications

Although they are a separate effort, the NASA-GSFC cFS applications are being updated for compatibility with cFS-Bootes. Additionally, Data Storage, File Manager, Health and Safety, Housekeeping, and Memory Dwell have updated licenses to Apache 2.0. Expect to see more updates as we get closer to the next cFS release.

Community Engagement and Transparency

We've gotten your feedback about communication, documentation, and other challenges and want to say: We Agree! The team is working to improve everyone's experience with cFS while also maintaining a quality software platform. We won't move as fast as we'd like and we will make some mistakes but your feedback, advice, and encouragement are valued and helpful. Our community is leading the way on how open-source aerospace software can be successful!

We aim to keep sending regular updates and eventually host a virtual community "townhall". In the meantime, feel free to follow our development and report feature requests and bugs and follow along our weekly code changes on GitHub, keep the conversation going on the mailing list at [email protected], or reach out to the program management team at [email protected].

Thank for your support,
The NASA core Flight System Team