Mats Tage Axelsson shows how open source frameworks and Linux can help navigate you safely to your coding destination.

E ven though the car industry has been, and still is, quite slow on innovation, cars are now packed with electronics. The systems range from entertainment to keeping track of components and helping you drive safely – or not at all. Ever since Tesla included a tablet instead of instruments, the major manufacturers have been trying to keep up.

The Linux Foundation has joined this race by building the Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) distribution that was established in 2014. Designed to be run in a car (obviously) and available at all times, this means a small, embedded system for which there are plenty of options. AGL chose Yocto as an underlying build system as it’s already aimed at embedded systems and commonly used in IoT and other systems.

Choosing Yocto means all the communication protocols that an in-car system will need are included. Since these are for embedded systems, they already support the majority of buses and interfaces. Included in the distribution are many subsystems including infotainment, instrument clusters and more. As a project, they aim to have the base for all parts needed for a modern car. This also includes telematics and all the sophisticated stuff an autonomous vehicle needs.

Before you jump to the conclusion that this is a niche project not used in any actual cars, be aware that this is already running in many models from Subaru, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz. The project enjoys wide industry supports as the value to manufacturers is huge, saving them millions in development costs.

Since AGL acts as an overall distribution, many of the parts it utilises come from other projects., As the needs of a modern car are diverse those projects encompass a wide range. We’ll cover some of the core ones here.

G ENIVI is a part of AGL and is the project that handles information and entertainment displays. An industry group drives the project, aiming to enable many operating systems for in-vehicle use. They work to allow connections between systems in the vehicle.

One sub-project covers a standard data interface unifying data handling across multiple vehicles. Using standards in this way clears many hurdles for companies and helps them focus on their own special features. The standard also simplifies connection to different cloud providers, which enables competition.