— Ten Years of CIP: From Shared Questions to a Shared Foundation —
Author: Yoshitake Kobayashi and Kazuhiro Hayashi, Toshiba
The Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) marks its tenth anniversary in 2026.
To reflect on this milestone, several partners—including Siemens—have shared their perspectives on why CIP was needed and what it has achieved over the past decade. As highlighted in Siemens’ contribution, CIP was built around a simple but critical idea: establishing a trusted software base for critical infrastructure and industrial systems through sustained upstream collaboration, benefiting both industry and the broader open source community.
Building on those perspectives, this article revisits how CIP came into being—and why its emergence was ultimately inevitable—from the viewpoint of Toshiba.
2014: Different Paths, the Same Question
The origins of CIP go back to before its formal launch in 2016.
In 2014, within the Consumer Electronics (CE) Workgroup of the Linux Foundation, Toshiba proposed addressing a growing challenge: how to establish a Linux-based foundation that could be trusted for long-term use in social (civil) infrastructure systems.
Systems in domains such as energy, transportation, and industrial control are expected to operate reliably over decades. Yet at the time, mainstream Linux distributions and support models struggled to meet key non-functional requirements, including long-term maintenance, reproducibility, and security. These were not abstract concerns—they were recurring issues observed in real products and field deployments.
This proposal, discussed within the Linux Foundation, outlined the need for a shared, long-term supported Linux base for civil infrastructure use cases.
Only later did it become clear that Siemens had independently reached a very similar conclusion and submitted a closely aligned proposal to the same organization during the same period. The two efforts emerged just months apart, in October and December of 2014.
What may appear as coincidence is better understood as convergence.
As civil infrastructure systems continued to digitalize, different organizations were naturally led to the same fundamental question.
2015: Making the Question Shared
These parallel efforts came together in June 2015 at LinuxCon Japan.
At that event, Toshiba and Siemens jointly presented
“Applying Linux to the Civil Infrastructure.”
While the name “CIP” was not yet widely used, the ideas presented there would later define the project’s direction.
The shared understanding was clear:
- Civil infrastructure systems serve as vital societal lifelines.
- While IT-driven technologies are increasingly adopted, critical non-functional requirements—such as functional safety, reliability, long-term support, security, and real-time behavior—remain insufficiently addressed.
- The operating system and its foundational software should not be treated as a point of competition, but rather as a common base to be developed collaboratively.
This was not a product announcement.
It was an open articulation of shared challenges, intended to invite discussion and cooperation.
That message resonated. Over time, the ideas discussed there evolved into the CIP project.
Why CIP Was Needed: Lessons from the Field
Linux is widely recognized for its robustness. However, in real-world infrastructure systems, teams repeatedly face challenges such as:
- Issues that occur only rarely and are extremely difficult to reproduce
- Problems that do not appear in test environments but surface under real operating conditions
- Accumulated local patches that make long-term maintenance increasingly complex
CIP addressed these challenges by providing a framework in which they are no longer handled in isolation, but shared and resolved collectively in collaboration with upstream communities.
A concrete example illustrates the importance of this approach.
In the CIP 4.4 RT kernel, a rare issue was identified during system startup, occurring only once every 10,000 to 20,000 boots. Although infrequent, the issue could effectively cause a kernel hang. By the time the investigation began, the kernel version had already reached end-of-life, making upstream fixes unlikely. At the same time, migrating to a newer kernel was not straightforward due to constraints related to non-functional requirements and compatibility.
Thanks to CIP’s sustained support framework, it was possible to work closely with maintainers to analyze the issue and implement a fix. The solution was applied by backporting changes from newer kernels, ensuring both technical validity and maintainability.
This case demonstrates that CIP is not simply about extending support timelines.
It provides a practical, working foundation capable of addressing real-world issues throughout the lifecycle of infrastructure systems.
What CIP Represents
CIP is more than a long-term support effort.
Its core principles—industrial-grade quality, sustainability, and security—reflect the requirements of systems that underpin society.
While specific products cannot be disclosed, CIP’s achievements are actively utilized in mission-critical environments, contributing not only to individual systems but to the broader resilience of civil infrastructure.
In recent years, its scope has expanded to include areas such as security, software updates, and Software Bills of Materials (SBOM), reflecting a shared responsibility toward long-term system integrity.
Ten Years That Were Inevitable
CIP did not begin as a fully formed initiative. Questions raised independently in 2014 were shared openly in 2015, and shaped into a collaborative project in 2016.
At its core was a common understanding: this is not an area for competition, but for cooperation.
Ten years later, CIP has become a reference point for industrial-grade open source in the civil infrastructure domain. It represents not only a technical base, but a community built on shared challenges, shared solutions, and shared responsibility.
Looking ahead, CIP will continue to play a key role in enabling safe, sustainable, and trustworthy infrastructure systems worldwide.