BMW Continues Making Great Progress With Linux

[deusexmachina]

I want a fucking AMG G-class running OpenBSD.

[Ardje]

Fun fact: Windows instances are a minority on Azure, as >50% are running Linux. Why anyone would turn to Microsoft to host their Linux VM's, I have no idea, but apparently plenty of folks do. Still funny that Microsoft OS can't even win the majority of marketshare on their own cloud platform, lol.

Do you know how big a driver hell windows is if you want to virtualize it? I can imagine why people want to go to azure to host their windows shit. Especially since you can host the important servers too.
I am so spoiled with how easy linux installs are (especially if you just debootstrap and do most things by hand) that I struggle getting a qcow2 windows server 2012 from cloudimages to boot. So I forfeit and call in the "windows" experts. Because there is no such thing as debootstrap. And if you want to install from .iso you also need to know what you are going to do with it, because a terminal server requires a completely different image than mssql server it seems.
Anyway, azure has those automated. Also the licensing seems to be easier. Which is another can of worms.

[starshipeleven]

Fun fact: Windows instances are a minority on Azure, as >50% are running Linux. Why anyone would turn to Microsoft to host their Linux VM's, I have no idea, but apparently plenty of folks do. Still funny that Microsoft OS can't even win the majority of marketshare on their own cloud platform, lol.

Customers with both Windows and Linux/FreeBSD VMs will very likely prefer to keep their non-Windows VMs on Azure instead of having two cloud providers.

[torsionbar28]

You know that those services won't really work without the linux network nodes, and the Microsoft Cloud servers all run on hardware that run linux on the BMC (okay, there seems to be an exception, but most run linux).

Fun fact: Windows instances are a minority on Azure, as >50% are running Linux. Why anyone would turn to Microsoft to host their Linux VM's, I have no idea, but apparently plenty of folks do. Still funny that Microsoft OS can't even win the majority of marketshare on their own cloud platform, lol.

[Ardje]

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

You know that those services won't really work without the linux network nodes, and the Microsoft Cloud servers all run on hardware that run linux on the BMC (okay, there seems to be an exception, but most run linux).

[nabero]

Heh, wouldn't be the first time.

https://hackaday.com/2017/12/30/34c3-using-your-car-as-video-game-controller/

https://hackaday.com/2017/12/22/turn...me-controller/

It has already been done with SuperTuxKart also ..

https://blog.mercedes-benz-passion.com/2019/02/supertuxkart-mit-mbux-im-mercedes-cla/

I don't read german, but if someone finds the instructions to do the same, I would certainly buy that car.

[discordian]

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.

Xenomai or jailhouse can be used in some parts of these, typically with some redundancy or failsafes. Doesn't make sense to use these everywhere of course.

[starshipeleven]

Let's hope their kernel won't be tivotized.

For the love of God the whole goddamn thing MUST be tivoized as shit. I DO NOT want any safety-critical system to be easily replaced with custom code.

Tinker with something else please, a car is a fucking weapon.

GPLv3 would fix this issue, but it's not something that people in charge have considered.

GPLv3 would only make Linux not attractive anymore for those usecases while not solving the issue, which is exactly what "people in charge" aka Torvalds have considered back then when the GPLv3 it was introduced.

[starshipeleven]

Excellent, but what it mean for users?

Not directly, so the cars won't be more "hackable".

The benefit is that they are paying for Linux development in a specific field where it could surely use it (realtime and safety-critical usecases) and using better development practices themselves (i.e. not accepting random blobs in their system).

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.

You can do that already, cars produced in the last decade(s) have a debug port called OBD or OBD2 and through that you can connect an OBD adapter that can talk to the onboard systems through a relatively standard interface, and send over the data through bluetooth or wifi (or USB) to a computer system running applications like https://www.obdautodoctor.com/tour that display the data.

You can't usually control much of the system without the dedicated software for each manufacturer that they use for debug or diagnostics, so you won't be able to automate tasks in the car, for example, but I don't see much point in doing that imho.

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).

That's tangential, manufacturers can implement tracking in any firmware.

Also to be fair the tracking is not in Linux (the kernel) but in the userspace components (the rest of the OS).

[Tomin]

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

Imagine driving a vehicle, inside a vehicle!

Heh, wouldn't be the first time.

https://hackaday.com/2017/12/30/34c3-using-your-car-as-video-game-controller/

https://hackaday.com/2017/12/22/turn-a-car-into-a-game-controller/