Clear Linux Is Being Used Within Some Automobiles

[skeevy420]

Come on Skeevy, we're supposed to be among civilized people here. Here we call it kernel panic.

Yeah...not to mention that in that instance it would technically be the Red Screen of Death, because all the blood covering everything is red, followed by the tires becoming Red Rings of Death since the brakes are out and that cyclist just got ran TF over

[rabcor]

Gives the BSOD an entirely new meaning

Come on Skeevy, we're supposed to be among civilized people here. Here we call it kernel panic.

[marlock]

IMHO the touchscreen rich UIs will make sense once they're used in self-driving cars... in that context the driver will no longer need eyes on the road 110% of the time.

Until then there is no requirement for complex user interaction beyond infotainement, so it's what we have today, more like copilot / parked car tasks.

Also I believe there is quite a bit of experimental design work being done with HUD projections on the windshield and voice commands, instead of necessarily touch panels... god knows how good that will be how soon, but it's at least potentially better for non-selfdriving cars.

[skeevy420]

Ugh, I sure hope not. It's bad enough that most new cars come with touch screens within reach of the driver. Sure they look spiffy and modern, but the massively idiotic thing about a touch screen in a car, is that it requires you to LOOK at it to operate it. The very last thing any driver should be doing is taking eyes off the road to operate a touch screen. It's an amazingly stupid turn we've taken in the automotive world. You not only have to look at the touch screen to interact with it, you have to keep looking at it to validate that your inputs were received. So stupid. Physical buttons and knobs have a tactile response that allows you to identify them without looking, and allows you to confirm your input again without looking by feeling the button depress or the knob rotate. How much money has been spent on PSA's telling us not to text and drive? How is operating a built in touchscreen any different from operating a cell phone touch screen? It isn't. This touchscreen dashboard stuff is all bad, all of it.

So much that.

As someone who refuses to use a phone while driving* and roots/roms all of my phones just to use long-press volume for track skip** just so I can change songs on my phone without looking away from the road...touchscreen car interfaces just piss me off.

My car has BT, but it's such a PITA to use since it's buried 4 menus down combined with everyother time I go to drive the damn thing won't sync my phone so I have to delete it and readd it to the car's BT system....whatever Ford used in 2014 sucks major ass. Agent 47, today we have a contract for a BT engineer at Ford...seriously, it's that bad...

It's like you said, all those PSAs are all like "Don't use your touchscreen phone while driving"....so of course that means the touchscreen tablet mounted to my dash is A-OK

*my family hates that because I run all the errands and if they don't catch me in a parking lot or drive thru then I won't answer the call and they have to wait until I can pull over safely...half the time they forget why they called so I end up having to go to back to the store to get tomato paste (that happened yesterday)

**luckily that's a hidden adb setting with Android 8 and up and doesn't require root

[torsionbar28]

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.

Ugh, I sure hope not. It's bad enough that most new cars come with touch screens within reach of the driver. Sure they look spiffy and modern, but the massively idiotic thing about a touch screen in a car, is that it requires you to LOOK at it to operate it. The very last thing any driver should be doing is taking eyes off the road to operate a touch screen. It's an amazingly stupid turn we've taken in the automotive world. You not only have to look at the touch screen to interact with it, you have to keep looking at it to validate that your inputs were received. So stupid. Physical buttons and knobs have a tactile response that allows you to identify them without looking, and allows you to confirm your input again without looking by feeling the button depress or the knob rotate. How much money has been spent on PSA's telling us not to text and drive? How is operating a built in touchscreen any different from operating a cell phone touch screen? It isn't. This touchscreen dashboard stuff is all bad, all of it.

[edwaleni]

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.

You might be interested in knowing that one global auto maker has been resisting Android and Apple in the auto because they both refused to disclose their vulnerabilities.

That company is Toyota. They released their in house Entune 3.0 in 2018, but due to customer demand they were allowing Lexus and Toyota Trucks to use Android Auto.

Here's the Toyota list for Android Auto.

• 4Runner 2020-
• Aygo 2018-
• Sequoia 2020-
• Tacoma 2020-
• Tundra 2020-
• Yaris (Europe Only) 2019-

Just last week Lexus announced their support:

Lexus confirms most of its 2020 lineup will be compatible with Android Auto, including RX, RC, and UX models, as well as select ES and NX vehicles from October 2019 production. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be support for a wireless mode, as the manufacturer mentions you'll have to use a USB cable to connect your phone to the car's infotainment system.

For Apple Car Play, here is the Lexus list:

• 2018*: LC, LS, RC, RC F, NX

• 2019: LC, LS, UX, RC, RC F*, ES*, NX*

• 2020: LC, LS, UX, RC, RC F, ES, NX, RX

And for Toyota: 2019 Toyota’s with Apple CarPlay

• Avalon
• Corolla Hatchback
• Camry
• C-HR
• RAV4
• Sienna

2020 Toyota’s with Apple CarPlay

• Supra
• Yaris Hatchback
• Corolla
• Corolla Hybrid
• Sequoia
• Tundra
• Tacoma
• 4Runner

According to Bloomberg, a Toyota spokesperson said they had been reluctant to add the “…software due safety and security reasons.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-21/toyota-is-said-to-agree-to-add-android-auto-in-its-cars

[bregma]

So, what is Nvidia's self-driving platform using? IIRC something about their hardware getting ASIL-D certification and I thought they only supported Linux.

I'm certainly aware of their work to get ASIL-D qualification but not with Linux. I can say with certainty and without fear of abrogating any NDA they do not only support Linux.

[coder]

I would predict the billions of dollars and years of time need to get the kernel certified would preclude using that in any part of the car that doesn't have a touchscreen would just be a non-starter spend since there's already less expensive, better software out there that's already doing the job. Now, that's just the OS kernel. There's the remaining 90% of the software stack.

So, what is Nvidia's self-driving platform using? IIRC something about their hardware getting ASIL-D certification and I thought they only supported Linux.

[bregma]

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

I know they're trying with AGL, but they'd have to get ISO 26262 certification at the ASIL-D level. I'm intimately familiar with the Linux kernel (and with ISO 26262 certification), and I would predict the billions of dollars and years of time need to get the kernel certified would preclude using that in any part of the car that doesn't have a touchscreen would just be a non-starter spend since there's already less expensive, better software out there that's already doing the job. Now, that's just the OS kernel. There's the remaining 90% of the software stack. No GPL3 software will ever smell the axle grease (because of the patent clause), so it' gotta be either bespoke or cult-developed libc and up. More billions and years and certifications.

Linux has an excellent place in automotive, and will be seeing massive quantities of investment. I just can't see it being in any kind of critical or safety application. Correction: properly applied in any kind of safety application -- there's always fuckups like the 737 MAX-8. Solid rocket booster O-rings. Therac 25s. It's just a matter of time.

[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.