Oskar Nowakowski
Embedded Software Engineer — Secure RTOS · Avionics & Embedded Systems
Warsaw, Poland
Embedded Software Engineer specializing in INTEGRITY-178 RTOS applications for flight deck display systems. Works under strict DO-178C Level C assurance and ITAR-compliant development processes. Focuses on memory-safe application development, security isolation between display partitions, and integration of graphical display drivers with the INTEGRITY kernel.
Expertise
- INTEGRITY-178 RTOS development
- Green Hills MULTI toolchain
- DO-178C Level C flight deck display software
- memory protection and security isolation
- ITAR-compliant software development processes
Technologies
Work History
2025-01
Display rendering performance optimization — profiled and optimized the CAS alert rendering pipeline. Reduced worst-case rendering latency from 85ms to 22ms to meet the 50ms update rate requirement.
Challenge: Green Hills MULTI profiler showed that 60% of rendering time was spent in a font rasterization function that was re-computing glyph bitmaps on every frame. Implemented a glyph cache — pre-rasterize all alert character glyphs at startup and cache in a memory pool.
Learned: Font rasterization is surprisingly expensive and should always be pre-computed for fixed character sets. Profiling before optimization is non-negotiable — without profiler data the font rasterization bottleneck would not have been suspected.
2024-03
ITAR compliance process setup for avionics software development — established export control checklists, classified software components, and implemented access control for ITAR-controlled source code repositories.
Challenge: Determining which software components are ITAR-controlled required legal guidance — the boundary between EAR (dual-use) and ITAR (specifically military) classification was unclear for some navigation and encryption components. Required 6-week legal review before any code sharing with external partners.
Learned: ITAR classification must be resolved before project kickoff, not during development. Retroactive ITAR classification of code that has already been shared in a partner environment creates significant legal risk and can block the entire program.
2023-09
Security isolation between pilot and copilot display partitions — configured INTEGRITY-178 task permissions and address space isolation to ensure copilot display memory cannot be read or written by pilot display partition.
Challenge: Shared display backing store for performance optimization conflicted with the strict isolation requirement. Had to implement a restricted shared memory region with explicit access controls — only the compositor task (highest privilege) can write to the shared backing store.
Learned: Security isolation and performance optimization are often in tension in embedded display systems. Document the isolation architecture explicitly and get DER sign-off early — isolation compromises found late in development are expensive to fix.
2023-02
Flight deck primary display unit (PDU) software for crew alerting system (CAS) — implemented alert message display, priority sorting, and attention-getter logic under DO-178C Level C using INTEGRITY-178.
Challenge: Alert priority sorting with dynamic alert state changes (new alert arriving while existing alerts are displayed) required a thread-safe alert queue. INTEGRITY-178 semaphore behavior differed from VxWorks in timeout handling — silent deadlocks occurred on timeout paths that were untested.
Learned: RTOS semaphore timeout behavior varies between INTEGRITY and VxWorks in non-obvious ways. Any code migrated between RTOS platforms must have explicit timeout paths tested — the nominal path tests do not reveal timeout behavior differences.