Manuel Lopez Michelone 4 / May / 2015, 9:16 a.m. – unocero

The software is that part of computer systems that are intangible. Come on, that eventually the source code of any piece of software, operating systems, applications, tools, etc., are zeros and ones in chips also are distributed in ways we can not even imagine that somehow run as programs that use daily. Overall we think the software you write is well done and good, sometimes for some reason “freezes” lock, and forces us to reboot your machine to return to a known state.

In regard to home computing the worst that can happen, when the team decides not respond when work- is that we have to reboot, but what about engineers Software working in mission-critical systems, such as applications and programs using modern aircraft? Hence it is essential that the programs do not catch because they could jeopardize a flight and the lives of passengers and crew. In fact, so there is even an entire discipline that seeks to demonstrate how the software is correct and functional.

In the Boeing 787 Dreamliner a software problem seems teams happened to be forced to reset ed 248 days. If this procedure is not done, the system enters a mode error control and the aircraft could lose all its electrical energy. The reason for this, according to an official of the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) is: “This condition is caused by an internal counter in the software that go over your limit (falls in overflow, it) after 248 days of continuous use. This could turn into a loss of power the aircraft, which could even lose control of the aircraft “.

So then, the problem is a classic overflow. Is it easy fix? Would not it be sufficient to add more bits to avoid this problem? Or maybe use infinite precision (bigint) to avoid the difficulty? Perhaps the most obvious solution is that when it comes to this time of overflow (or earlier), the system will reboot itself.

But while a patch for this problem, all Dreamliners will have to reboot before 248 days. It notes that the FAA indicates that the restart may take an hour in total, therefore, the problem goes beyond power cycling systems. Interestingly, the Airbus A380 is comparable in complexity to the Dreamliner, and the software used has more than 100 million lines of code

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