BMW Continues Making Great Progress With Linux

[tildearrow]

Michael You forgot the (IMO) most important bullet point:

- Used SuperTuxKart to demo the capabilities of their infotainment system

Not using binary blobs and stuff is cool, but SUPERTUXKART!!!

Now what if they add support for driving the kart with the actual car?

Imagine driving a vehicle, inside a vehicle!

[Volta]

x2, the mainline kernel is so massive nowadays, I don't ever see it replacing VxWorks or QNX in these kinds of safety critical applications.

Yeah, it won't be easy for car company to debug every graphic, audio, networking, iio, mtd, raid, HPC, chrome, SGI, toshiba, cisco, kvm, xen drivers out there plus Ext2,3,4, XFS, btrfs, fat, ufs file systems. Oh, wait.. However, it's still bigger than FreeRTOS, though. Linux RT supports SMP while I'm not sure if others does the same.

[kingu]

Last thing I saw was BMW on an advert for Microsoft cloud services.

[azdaha]

Excellent, but what it mean for users?

OK, I understand that car it is not silly toy like phone, so "modding" or system change cannot be easily accessible, but there could be for example use open standards, etc. It would be nice to have some GPL applications that could connect with car system for statistics/diagnostics/etc. - and it could be nice to have such programs on Linux.

Linux is adored by companies, because they could take it almost for free and then sell it with proprietary "addons" that will harvest user data only for them. User in such situations likely do not have benefits from that (for example Android).

The benefits to users of Linux is additional support through code reviews and feature expansion of existing software or new software and technology. Additionally, the open nature of the underlying systems allows for modification by end-users and analyses by security researchers, among other things. It's easy to be cynical, even though there might be legitimate reasons for it at times.

[azdaha]

x2, the mainline kernel is so massive nowadays, I don't ever see it replacing VxWorks or QNX in these kinds of safety critical applications.

Agreed. Although, it's worth noting security and long-term stability benefits when compared to proprietary systems that might lose support at some point, or which rely on security through obscurity practices.

e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/urgent-1...erable-devices

Arguably, it could become feasible at some point to forgo reliance on lighter systems in favor of realtime linux systems or derivatives as hardware performance and designs evolve. Admittedly, however, I could be overlooking some hard limits in terms of physical constraints.

[torsionbar28]

Linux is and will continue to be used for the non-safety critical systems. For the control units influencing/controlling the steering of the car, Linux is unfortunately too big and complex (in terms of code to be certified). It very, very likely won't replace QNX & Co in there. :-(

x2, the mainline kernel is so massive nowadays, I don't ever see it replacing VxWorks or QNX in these kinds of safety critical applications.

[OlafLostViking]

Linux is and will continue to be used for the non-safety critical systems. For the control units influencing/controlling the steering of the car, Linux is unfortunately too big and complex (in terms of code to be certified). It very, very likely won't replace QNX & Co in there. :-(

[milkylainen]

Actually, BMW started open-source initiatives way before any other Automotive company.
DLT - the most popular logger in the embedded industry, was created by BMW( https://github.com/GENIVI/dlt-daemon...master/AUTHORS ).
They tried to push also for open-source HMI development, but most of the other members just used the code written by BMW and were not contributing back anything.

I'm pretty sure every automotive company with any self regard has engineers that have dabbled with Linux and applications for ages.
The big question is to what extent they are using Linux and other open source components in their cars.
Delivering in-car systems based on Linux for production cars is a big step up towards the Linux base community.
And for that they are worthy of receiving cred.

[stupotace]

Excellent, but what it mean for users?

It's not always about the end users, it's about the linux/FOSS ecosystem as a whole. The more companies that realize the benefit behind using open source software, the more involvement, active development, and development expertise there is world wide. Sure, not every company is going to be 'giving back' to the community, but some of them will. And the alternative is that they're buying/keeping proprietary software, which means their developers aren't familiar with using e.g. linux apis, but some other embedded system.

Slowly but surely, linux is replacing more and more proprietary software, and that has a butterfly effect.

[Alliancemd]

Great BMW. Welcome to the 21st century.
Now you can join the club with Tesla, Volvo and probably a few more.

Actually, BMW started open-source initiatives way before any other Automotive company.
DLT - the most popular logger in the embedded industry, was created by BMW( https://github.com/GENIVI/dlt-daemon...master/AUTHORS ).
They tried to push also for open-source HMI development, but most of the other members just used the code written by BMW and were not contributing back anything.