Electronics Weekly's
Focus on Mobile Linux
Some fundamental shifts have been taking place in the automotive
industry over the past two years that will dramatically change the
way multimedia entertainment equipment is designed.
Traditionally, providing equipment for car manufacturers has been a
long process handled by vertical companies or collections of
companies. A new entertainment system can cost from $80 million to
as much as $300 million and take years to develop. With a team of
up to 200 people working on a new platform that ships perhaps 1
million to 2 million units, there is a tremendous amount of cost
just from the research and development, even before a single unit
ships.
Originally companies used proprietary hardware but have begun using
more standard devices to cut down on development time and cost. And
software development is going in the same direction. Instead of
using proprietary code running on a real-time operating system, the
automotive industry needs to find ways to reduce costs and reuse
code from other parts of its industry, and even from the consumer
industry.
There is an increasing need for more innovation and capability in
the automotive platforms, particularly in entertainment and
multimedia. New technologies, from Adobe's Flash video software to
the latest high-definition video disks, need to be supported, and
the cost of porting software drivers to some operating system
platforms is prohibitive.
New consumer devices come along regularly, such as the tremendously
successful Apple iPod and iPhone, for example, and car
manufacturers want to quickly equip their vehicles with interfaces
to these latest devices without having to wait many months or even
years.
The cost of porting the drivers and interfaces for these systems
has to be carried somewhere, either by the operating system vendor
or by the development team. Some vendors are trying to bring this
under a proprietary operating system, but this is a fantastically
expensive approach for the embedded market.
Even with an established desktop operating system, a divergence
opens up between the less rugged desktop version with the full
range of drivers and interfaces but with a large memory footprint,
and the embedded version, which in the past has had limited
interface and driver support because of cost.
There are vendors developing embedded operating systems for the
automotive infotainment market but they do not have the scale to
bring all the new and exciting capabilities to the equipment
quickly. Well established real-time operating systems such as
Wind River’s
VxWorks can have around 50,000 developers and still can’t provide
all the required drivers and interfaces in the time needed.Because
of this, a number of large car and equipment manufacturers have
been working on ways to provide innovative new equipment designs.
Open Source Linux
There is only one way that can provide the scale and support
needed for fast innovation. The open source model of Linux makes
use of the desktop model by providing drivers and interfaces to all
the developers working on a project, allowing them to innovate
faster and provide new applications.
This huge, constantly evolving ecosystem of software provides a
tremendous base for applications development and avoids the need
for software developers to produce different versions for different
operating systems, dramatically speeding up the development time
and allowing engineers to concentrate on innovation rather than
reinvent the software infrastructure for each new project.
But Linux and the open source approach has been fraught with
problems in the past for embedded systems. There can be many
different flavors, and putting together a complete Linux
environment can be time-consuming and prone to errors. This is what
car manufacturers, which demand high levels of quality throughout
the development process, want to avoid.
So an open source Linux for the automotive infotainment industry
has to provide a rugged, proven core that is stable for embedded
applications with a common set of well-established, proven
capabilities that form the bedrock for fast, innovative application
development. At the same time, it has to have a completely open
applications programming interface (API) to enable other
applications to be easily bolted into the kernel and have a strong
test environment.
This has to be done under the open source license without any
proprietary technology that could be used to lock a developer or
equipment maker into a particular software provider.
The move to a standard platform also opens up potential new
business models for the car manufacturers, the Tier 1 equipment
suppliers, third-party aftermarket equipment suppliers, and even
third-party software providers which can offer software upgrades to
add new features. At the moment there is limited opportunity for
car and equipment manufacturers, including third-party equipment,
to generate additional revenue once they have sold a vehicle, other
than by maintenance, and that has been a difficult model to
pursue.
With a consistent Linux-based software infrastructure, new
applications can be easily added to existing hardware, providing
new revenue streams; this can be provided in a number of innovative
ways, from downloads to plug-in devices. This has been clearly
demonstrated in the satellite navigation business with the
additional market in maps and other add-on software applications.
Using an open source software model allows even more applications
to be generated even faster for a whole range of consumer equipment
that can be used in vehicles.
Once these drivers and interfaces are developed, they are
available to the whole market under an open source license,
allowing many people to reuse the technology, but there are also
more commercial licenses that allow smaller third-party vendors to
use this technology to develop applications and generate revenue.
This opens up another of the additional business models within the
ecosystem.
Automotive Linux
The key to unlocking the innovation, the reduced development
time, and new business models is a stable, proven, contained
implementation of Linux that is suitable for the automotive market
and yet makes use of the huge open source ecosystem of
software.
This has been implemented with the support of three large Tier 1
equipment makers to provide a common set of capabilities based
around a Linux core. The point is not to reinvent the kernel or the
environment but to pick and fully support a core capability.
The core capability has to include applications such as speech
recognition and speech-to-text that are already well-established,
as well as Bluetooth and advanced echo cancellation and noise
reduction software to improve the performance of mobile phone
systems. Consumers are also looking for music management and
automatic playlist technologies, as well as multimedia and DVD
playback.
All this software is already available in the open source
community, having been ported for the PC market; but the automotive
market needs a full test bench to ensure that applications can be
integrated quickly and accurately and identify any interoperability
issues that might cause problems.
Connectivity with popular devices such as the iPod and
multimedia support for a wide range of consumer electronics, video,
and audio standards can also be provided through the open source
ecosystem. New widgets and applications such as Google Earth can be
used with satellite navigation systems, either embedded in the
vehicle or as third-party equipment. This also allows the developer
to make use of the latest rich 3D graphics that are now common in
navigation systems to provide more innovative user interfaces
without having to port new technologies to a platform or wait for
them to be available.
Automotive developers have also had to address embedded issues,
such as power state management that provides the framework for how
the system performs during changes to vehicle and device power
state, particularly when the vehicle or equipment starts up and
shuts down.
This is not an issue in the desktop and portable market but is
vital within cars. Another issue is fast boot and initialisation,
working with the power state management, to make sure the
infotainment device is running within the prescribed time frame of
the car manufacturer.
Automotive Linux also has to include connectivity to and
interoperability with automotive networking standards such as the
Controller Area Network (CAN), a popular bus for in-vehicle
communications and industrial automation applications, and
Media-Oriented Systems Transport (MOST), the leading standard for
automotive multimedia networks.
All of these capabilities can be implemented within a
well-established development environment such as the Eclipse open
source development framework. This allows developers to use the
environment that they are already familiar with and start
generating new and innovative applications faster and with
significantly lower cost. Adding a test bench is also vital within
this environment to ensure the high-quality implementation that is
demanded in the automotive industry.
Standardising the environment
Linux is increasingly being used in standards organizations for
the same reasons it is a good choice for automotive. For example,
the OpenSAR consortium is using a commercial-grade Linux as the
basis of telecoms software architectures and has become
well-established. This is moving a previously vertically integrated
software model to a more horizontal model with new suppliers
offering a wider range of innovative applications but also meeting
the tight performance and quality requirements of the telecoms
industry.
The same is possible within the automotive industry through
bodies such as the software standards body AUTOSAR. This group of
car and equipment manufacturers is developing a standard selection
of applications to form the heart of a standard version.
The Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium (VIIC)
recently chose Linux as a run-time and development tool to develop
an onboard equipment (OBE) prototype. VIIC, backed by the US
Department of Transportation, aims to improve vehicle safety and
enable standard-based vehicle-to-vehicle communication; all the
major car manufacturers such as BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Ford, and
General Motors are a part of the consortium. This is a major
breakthrough for Linux in the automotive industry, and for the
first time this project will expose the automotive industry to the
open source community and working with Linux.
Open source advantages
Moving software development for automotive infotainment systems
to an open source platform provides a number of key advantages. By
using the extensive third-party software environment, developers
can move faster and concentrate on providing innovative new
applications rather than reinventing the software environment with
each new project. But it also opens up new business models for the
car and equipment manufacturers with software upgrades, and this
opens up new models for third-party software developers.
However, this move has to be handled carefully. To provide the
high-quality, reliable software that is demanded by the car
manufacturers, a well-defined, open API is required, alongside a
rugged development and test environment. A key selection of
applications integrated with the kernel provides a huge boost to
developers, who can also access the ecosystem of open source
software to provide flexible, innovative equipment designs in a
fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of traditional
automotive system development. This is vital in bringing the latest
consumer technology to cars in the time frames demanded by today's
customers.
Wind River Linux Platform for Infotainment
features
- Wind River's own Linux kernel (version 2.6)
- Optimization for Intel's Atom low-power multicore
processor
- Speech recognition and speech-to-text technologies by Nuance
Communications
- Bluetooth and advanced echo cancellation and noise reduction
solutions by Parrot
- Music management and automatic playlist technologies by
Gracenote
- Multimedia networking solutions by SMSC
- DVD playback by Corel’s LinDVD
- TestBench
- 24/7 support from application and sector specialists
- Eclipse development environment
- VxWorks development environment
By Alexander Kocher, Wind River
general manager for automotive. You can meet Alexander
at WindRiver'sFISITAbooth, Foyer F2 in
Munich – 14-19 September.
See also:Electronics Weekly's
Focus on Mobile Linux, a roundup of content
related to the open source operating system shaped for mobile
devices.