Author: Yoshitake Kobayashi, CIP TSC Chair, Toshiba
In April 2026, the Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP) project will celebrate its 10th Anniversary. Over the last decade, CIP has worked to solve one of the most critical challenges facing industrial and civil infrastructure systems: the Longevity Gap with Industrial Gradeness.
Our mission has been clear from the start: to establish Industrial Grade Linux (IGL) as an Open Source Base Layer (OSBL), ensuring 10+ years of stability and reliability—an indispensable foundation for the Critical Infrastructure and Industrial Systems that power our world.
The Founding Vision: Collaboration Over Crisis
Around 2015, the industrial sector faced a dilemma. While the IT world moved at high speed with new Linux kernel releases every few months, operational technology (OT) systems—such as power plants, railways, and industrial automation—had lifecycles spanning more than 10 years, sometimes 50 years. This forced companies into expensive, insecure, and unsustainable private “forks” of Linux.
To solve this “Maintenance Crisis,” leaders like Renesas, Siemens, and Toshiba united to create a collaborative, non-competitive base layer. We defined the requirements for Industrial Grade Linux through three primary challenges:
- Industrial Gradeness: Ensuring Real-Time capability to provide the deterministic performance required for mission-critical control.
- Sustainability: Providing Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) to maintain software for 10+ years.
- Security: Implementing continuous vulnerability management and adherence to international industrial standards.
Five Pillars of Stability: CIP’s Core Achievements
Our journey has been built on five technical pillars, each addressing a critical need for civil infrastructure:
1. Kernel Team: The 10+ Year Promise
CIP pioneered the Super Long-Term Support (SLTS) kernel, extending maintenance far beyond standard LTS to meet industrial product lifecycles.
- Milestone: Our first SLTS kernel, Linux 4.4, is supported from 2016-2027, proving the viability of a consortium-maintained kernel.
- Current Status: We actively maintain five concurrent SLTS versions (4.4, 4.19, 5.10, 6.1, and 6.12). We have also successfully worked with the Real-Time Linux project to mainline PREEMPT_RT, bringing native real-time capabilities to the core Linux kernel.
2. CIP Core Working Group: Reference and Reproducibility
We strategically chose Debian as our primary reference distribution, contributing to its LTS/ELTS programs to avoid “reinventing the wheel.”
- Profiles: We provide a Tiny Profile for resource-constrained devices and a Generic Profile for standard industrial use cases, both built using the ISAR build system.
- Reproducible Builds: We have achieved and continuously verify bit-for-bit reproducible builds using ISAR-CIP-CORE. This is crucial for supply chain security, trusted transparency, and enabling small, efficient delta updates in the field.
3. Testing Working Group: Validation at Scale
Our testing architecture ensures the reliability of our SLTS kernels on real hardware.
- Upstream Integration: CIP is fully integrated with KernelCI, sharing results publicly and visualizing kernel health over several years.
- CIP Testing: What began as the “Board at Desk (B@D)” initiative has evolved into a fully distributed and highly reproducible testing environment integrated with KernelCI and LAVA, performing validation at scale.
4. Security Working Group: Conformance to Industrial Standards
Security is baked in by default, with hardening guidelines designed to meet stringent industrial requirements.
- IEC 62443 Alignment: CIP has achieved historic milestones in industrial security. After becoming the first open-source project to complete the IEC 62443-4-1 conformance assessment in August 2024, we reached another major goal in February 2026 by successfully completing the IEC 62443-4-2 assessment. This dual achievement dramatically reduces the cost of compliance for our users.
- Vulnerability Management: Our triage process filters the “CVE flood” to assess impact specifically on CIP SLTS kernel configurations, allowing us to focus efforts on truly exploitable risks.
5. Software Update Working Group: Secure & Robust Updates
We provide a sustainable solution for software lifecycle management by integrating SWUpdate and TUF (The Update Framework). This ensures secure delivery with signed artifacts and safe rollbacks (A/B partitioning). We are currently working on WFX integration to automate update workflows for massive device fleets at scale.
The Road Ahead: The Compliance Base
Looking forward, CIP is evolving from a “Technical Base” into a “Compliance Base.” The rise of global regulations, such as the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), mandates security updates throughout a product’s entire lifecycle. CIP’s long-term maintenance approach, reproducible builds, and security artifacts will form a crucial part of the evidence required for regulatory auditing and certification.
Conclusion
Over the past ten years, CIP has successfully built the open-source foundation required by industrial systems. By enhancing sustainability through SLTS and ensuring industrial gradeness through real-time performance, we enable our members to deploy secure, reliable, and future-proof products.
As we look toward the next decade, one thing remains certain: for the civil infrastructure our civilization runs on, collaboration is the key to sustainable living.
