Clear Linux Is Being Used Within Some Automobiles

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Clear Linux Is Being Used Within Some Automobiles

Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Clear-Linux-Cars

[rabcor]

Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, I prefer not to have hackable cars...

[skeevy420]

Not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, I prefer not to have hackable cars...

More good than bad. Personally, I'm more upset about the SpyWareOS being used to power the car's front end and not the O3FastOS powering the back end.

Dear Ubuntu,

You should switch focus from Ubuntu Desktop to Ubuntu Auto. We actually need Ubuntu Auto. Ubuntu Desktop? Not so much.

No technologically apt person likes the thought of Android Auto given how insecure that platform inherently is nor do we want to risk "How much for a quarter bag of the good stuff?" being transmitted to a contractor with the GPS coordinates of where my weed guy kicks it to some random Apple contractor/employee.

With the current duopoly between Apple and Google in the Auto realm and with how inherently insecure and simply how untrustworthy they are, this would be a prime market for y'all to turn your attention to as well as a way to turn all the seemingly wasted ARM and Ubuntu Phone work in to something that can produce a profit.

Signed,
People Against Apple and Google Every-fucking-where

[bregma]

I think you mean "in the dashboard of some automobiles." Linux has long been a part of the infotainment stack in automobiles, and it's hardly surprising if one particular distro supported by a billion-dollar hardware company gets chosen by another billion-dollar hardware company by C-level execs during karaoke night. Decision like that are not made by technical people.

What would surprise me is if any Linux distro managed to obtain ISO 26262 (functional safety in an automotive context) certification. Without that, it's not going under the hood. Period.

Having a backup camera stream appear on your dash upside down is one thing, but having a kernel panic when you press the brake pedal in an emergency is something else entirely. Rebooting your brakes in less than 2 seconds is just not good enough when that bicyclist appears out of nowhere on a dark road.

[skeevy420]

I think you mean "in the dashboard of some automobiles." Linux has long been a part of the infotainment stack in automobiles, and it's hardly surprising if one particular distro supported by a billion-dollar hardware company gets chosen by another billion-dollar hardware company by C-level execs during karaoke night. Decision like that are not made by technical people.

What would surprise me is if any Linux distro managed to obtain ISO 26262 (functional safety in an automotive context) certification. Without that, it's not going under the hood. Period.

Having a backup camera stream appear on your dash upside down is one thing, but having a kernel panic when you press the brake pedal in an emergency is something else entirely. Rebooting your brakes in less than 2 seconds is just not good enough when that bicyclist appears out of nowhere on a dark road.

Gives the BSOD an entirely new meaning

[caligula]

Off a lone Apollo Lake SoC, this Chinese car maker is using Clear Linux to do all the low-level tasks while Android 9.0 is ultimately what's used for driving the UI/infotainment displays within the car and interacting with the user.

The funny thing here is, Clear Linux is pretty optimized and sleek, but modern Android is not.

[bregma]

Gives the BSOD an entirely new meaning

Steve: Wow, what happened to your car's tires?

Dick: Oh, I ran over a couple of beer bottles.

Steve: Didn't you see them on the road?

Dick: No. The damn bicyclist had them in his backpack and my car runs Clear Linux under the hood.

[marlock]

I'm a little bit surprised that the distro "Clear Linux" is being used specifically, but not that an Intel-made Linux distro found it's way into cars.

They are part of the AGL - Automotive Grade Linux (them and almost every big car-related industry):

https://www.automotivelinux.org/about/members

Android was an easy early choice for infotainement (as was iOS, afaik even before android) because it was already a small-screen / touch-input solution, but only as long as infotainement was just infotainement.

Now that the industry is trying to build it's way up into self-driving cars, that infotainement panel might become a lot more important as a UI to interact with the deeper car-controlling systems. If the UI is, to an extent, necessary to driving, it needs critical elements to be reliably displayed, with high priority, over whatever else you're doing. Android's sluggish resource-hog unrealiability just won't cut it, hence AGL.

And AGL is not just focused on the infotainement, but spans the entire vehicle software stack.

[ThoreauHD]

I look forward to the GM Meltdown edition.

[starshipeleven]

I think you mean "in the dashboard of some automobiles." Linux has long been a part of the infotainment stack in automobiles, and it's hardly surprising if one particular distro supported by a billion-dollar hardware company gets chosen by another billion-dollar hardware company by C-level execs during karaoke night. Decision like that are not made by technical people.

What would surprise me is if any Linux distro managed to obtain ISO 26262 (functional safety in an automotive context) certification. Without that, it's not going under the hood. Period.

Yeah, this seems to be a VM-based setup where there ClearLinux is the hypervisor, so that if the Android 9 VM hangs hard (100% possible given what it is and what crap they will most likely run in it) the hypervisor can reboot it.

That said I also hope they are employing this system to avoid a repeat of the "remote controlled Dodge jeep" happening of 2015 where someone found out that the fucktards hooked up the infotainment system with Internet access through a LTE modem directly to the fucking CAN bus (internal communication between onboard safety-critical electronics in today's cars that are mostly "drive by wire"), and could basically take control of the vehicle with malware.