Vulkan For Planes & Cars - Khronos Starting Vulkan Safety Critical WG

It's not too surprising given the trajectory of Vulkan and past comments by The Khronos Group, but today at Embedded World Conference they announced the formation of the "Vulkan Safety Critical" working group as they seek to define a Vulkan standard for environments like automobiles and aircraft wanting to tap advanced, high-performance graphics and compute.

Khronos has long maintained OpenGL SC for safety critical applications from avionics to medical equipment albeit it's rather dated these days. OpenGL SC 2.0 was released in 2016 and derived from OpenGL ES 2.0. Vulkan Safety Critical (Vulkan SC?) will be the next-generation standard not only for safety critical graphics but also compute acceleration. There isn't a standard ready yet, but the working group is being formed to solicit feedback and evaluate necessary changes to improve the safety integrity of the Vulkan API. The principal focus of this new working group is on creating "safety critical graphics and compute where failure would create a significant increase in safety risk."

Vulkan safety critical will aim to comply with the RTCA DO-178C Level A / EASA ED-12C Level A (avionics); FACE (Future Airborne Capability Environment) (avionics); and ISO 26262 ASIL D (automotive) software standards for safety.

More details on this new working group at Khronos.org.

Embedded World Conference 2019 runs in the beautiful city of Nuremberg through 28 February; the Vulkan SC WG appears to be the main Khronos announcement for the event with apparently no new announcements around OpenGL ES or OpenGL SC expected while coming up next month is GDC where we should hear more about OpenXR 1.0.