CIP marks 10 years of Linux support for infrastructure

The Civil Infrastructure Platform has marked its 10th anniversary, a milestone that reflects a decade of work on long-term Linux support for critical infrastructure.

Created by companies in railways, electric power and factory automation, the Linux Foundation-hosted project was established to build and maintain an open source software base for systems that often remain in service for many years and cannot be updated easily. Its work includes Super Long Term Support, or SLTS, a core software layer called CIP Core, and testing designed to support stable deployments.

CIP is focused on sectors where software failures can have serious operational consequences, including energy networks, manufacturing systems, transport infrastructure and medical equipment. Those environments are also under pressure from tighter software assurance and supply chain rules, including the European Cyber Resilience Act.

That has increased interest in software that can be maintained over long periods without requiring each operator to build its own stack. CIP aims to reduce the cost and complexity of meeting safety and security requirements by providing a maintained base layer built around the Linux kernel and commonly used core packages.

Members backing the project include Renesas Electronics, Siemens, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Aronetics, CyberTrust, Hitachi and MOXA. The initiative also works with other open source projects and developer communities involved in long-term maintenance, testing and software verification.

Urs Gleim, CIP Governing Board Chair and Head of Central Research and Development at Siemens, said the project had grown from an uncertain idea into a widely used part of industrial computing.

"Ten years ago, when we declared we would support critical infrastructure with open source, many were skeptical about its continuity. But today, CIP has become an indispensable foundation supporting railways and power grids worldwide, achieving against that ambitious goal set ten years ago to maintain industrial-grade open source for decades," said Gleim.

Regulatory pressure

Industrial operators face a more demanding compliance environment, especially in Europe, where software producers and users are under stricter expectations on vulnerability management, transparency and product support. In that context, projects that can document maintenance histories and provide a clear software bill of materials have become more important.

One area of impact has been work around the IEC 62443 security standard, widely used in industrial automation and control systems. CIP argues that a common open source base can reduce duplicated certification work across companies that would otherwise follow separate compliance paths.

The project said its contribution extends beyond its own members because fixes and feedback generated in industrial settings are sent upstream to open source communities. That can improve software quality more broadly while giving companies in conservative sectors a way to influence software they depend on.

Yoshitake Kobayashi outlined the group's focus on continuity and trust in software used by essential services.

"Our mission is not just to maintain code. It is to continuously provide 'unwavering trust' through technology in an increasingly digitized society," said Kobayashi.

Wider ecosystem

Contributors from related projects and companies used the anniversary to highlight CIP's role in long-term software maintenance. Their comments pointed to the way industrial users rely on established open source projects while funding the work needed to keep them usable over extended periods.

Raphaël Hertzog, Debian Developer and Founder of Freexian, linked CIP's work to Debian's long-term support effort.

"The collaboration between Freexian and the CIP community around Debian LTS and ELTS demonstrates how enterprises can interact with the open source community to support the long-term maintenance of critical software. By building its industrial Linux on Debian, and by funding the Debian LTS project, CIP contributes to Debian's sustainability while addressing the real needs of long-lived industrial systems. This kind of collaboration strengthens both the critical infrastructure built on Debian and the wider open source ecosystem," said Hertzog.

Kevin Hilman, co-founder of KernelCI and CTO & co-founder of BayLibre, said CIP had also taken a sustained role in kernel testing infrastructure.

"CIP has been a core contributor to the KernelCI project since its formation as a Linux Foundation initiative, taking long-term responsibility for stabilizing and sustaining KernelCI itself, not just using it for testing long-term supported kernels. Through this sustained collaboration, KernelCI has continued to strengthen Linux kernel quality across architectures, helping make industrial-grade Linux a practical reality," said Hilman.

Chris Lamb, Core Team Member of the Reproducible Builds Project, pointed to software verification as another area where CIP has had influence.

"The collaboration between the Reproducible Builds project and CIP highlights a critical shift in how we approach industrial software. Through verifiability, CIP ensures that the open source foundation of our critical infrastructure is not only sustainable but also demonstrably secure. This commitment to transparency is vital for the trust and resilience required by critical systems over decades of operation," said Lamb.

CIP said its scope now extends to newer uses of Linux in infrastructure, including edge AI deployments that require predictable and secure operation in controlled environments.