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Linux Takes On Automotive Apps
loconet writes "Linux Devices has released an article about Metrowerks setting out to drive Linux further into the automotive telematics market by launching what it calls "Automotive Grade Linux," a version of Linux enhanced with non-traditional features to address the specific requirements of automotive telematics."
Kernel Panic: Your engine a splode!
ROMANES EUNT DOMUS
Your Corola has been rooted!
Now I can totally play Quake while I'm driving.
"Only 17 days left until we can leave hon, I'm just compiling starter.so"
I hadn't heard of Automotive Telematics before, nor did I know it was a $14 billion market and, even more surprising (to me), Microsoft has a version of CE that was released in 2002 and updated in 2003 that is specifically for that market. Well, you learn something new everyday within the hallowed halls of SlashDot. That said, I would think that Linux would be an ideal platform for this because it does meet the requirements for telematics as set forth in the article. I wonder how M$ will respond? Or, is it a big enough pie for everyone to have a slice?
http://www.busyweather.com/
How many car manufacturers are going to be putting some untested software into cars. Not only from a safety/reliability standpoint, but they also probably want to keep the locks closed on access to the software, and open source wouldn't work with this model.
Hope linux'd compete well against ms in this field and save us avoiding those microsoft cars' jokes from becoming a reality
More than half of words were buzzwords or acronyms.
Anyway, why exactly do you need a PowerPC 603e and two USB ports for..uh..diagnosing cars? Seems to me that the hardware is a bit overkill, and an embedded direct solution might function a little better by avoiding the overhead of simply running Linux. Don't get me wrong; Linux is great for full-powered machines, but this doesn't need to be full powered.
"UNIX
You get in the car and type grep store. You are given a list of 400 7-11's in your area and 50 grocery stores. After picking one and reaching speeds of 200 miles per hour en route, you arrive at the barber shop."
-- If Operating Systems Drove Your Car to the Store
Tweet, tweet.
It would be nice if they would start to use Linux in all machines where they wanted to write code with minimum overhead. I know people that have written large ammounts of code for everything from car computer systems to alarm clocks and its usually it some form of basic or C. Imagine if most of these products starting using a simple Linux system where you could reuse all kinds of crazy crap. You could be running toaster timers to clock your laps around a track in your car :D
Why try and do this with Linux when TRON is already the most widely used operating system for millions of devices? Or is it just the geek factor of knowing you're buying a car with a penguin inside?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
One step closer to cars driving instead of humans ...Insert geeky Matrix reference here...
This driver is not recognized... and it was the first time Linux crashed something.
" Your Corola has been rooted!"
You have to recompile your car to get the power windows to work.
You have to download binary drivers to get the advanced dash features to work.
RTFOM is necessary before starting the car.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS6531324140.html
... 5 minutes after turning on the car, it would rev to the max but it would run at only 40km/h, until you found out your car was exploited by some script kiddie.
But that would be because of the third party radio you're using.
Suse Linux:
You start kdestination and type the first few letters of the store name in the dialog box. A list of potential matching destinations pops up. You click on the one you want, and after clicking on the conformation, you arrive instantaneously at the store via the kwormhole daemon.
Yeah ... or NetStumbler. I'd like to see my car build up a real-time map of access points and put them on the HUD for me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You get your car home and wait 2 days for "emerge system" to finish.
Gentoo: when you receive the car, you have to push the "compile" button and wait two days to drive it.
Every time you change the oil you must do this again.
Contribute yours!
Or, you know, engineers who don't want people to DIE because they didn't test their product.
Thanks for trivializing our morals, ass.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
# apt-get upgrade spare-tire
...
the following packages will be REMOVED:
-donut spare tire
the following will be INSTALLED:
-full size spare tire
[downloading full-size-spare-tire]....[done]
Removing donut spare tire...
Installing full size spare tire...
# apt-get install power-locks
Package power-locks is part of package: power-group
# apt-get install power-group
$cat
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The press release keeps talking about their addition of real-time features added to Linux--RTAI, RTLinux, MontaVista, etc, not mentioned.
What are the development, licensing, etc, issues here?
Matt
The development package that they are offering it for appears to be the $5000 mobileGT Total5200 Unfortunately a bit-pricey for my homebuilt telematics project- I'll keep using the old laptop.
No, it was the lawyers. Largely prompted by Ralph Nader, iirc. Although the problems were the fault of accountants as much as engineers.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
Most likely MS will enter that world in about a year. They will want to somehow tie this back to their media center. I suspect that all these companies that are using MS will be wiped out in under a year due to this being a fairly new field (digital vs. analog).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
QNX is based off BSD.
QNX is a small RTOS with a micro-kernel architecture and a message-passing structure (that has big libraries on top of it, to make it feel like Unix)
BSD is an interactive, time-sharing system that was designed on VAXen for a serial terminal environment.
Thus, QNX & BSD are about as different as BSD and OS/360 are (but for much different reasons, of course).
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
No, I'm pointing out that many of the tests that were subsequently mandated by law are things engineers would run as due diligence - except when accountants and marketing forced us to put out products before we wanted to. Same story as anywhere else.
I just don't like it when people imply that we're (automotive engineers) intentionally careless with the lives of people by not trying our very best to make safe products - and not because of the law, because we're fucking human.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The specific car that prompted all this was, iirc, the Ford Pinto. They used to explode into a ball of flame if they were rear-ended. This was _not_ discovered by engineers carrying out due diligence until there were a lot of them already out on the roads (and probably it was only discovered at all because a few of them had already burst into flames). At this point, the accountants said, 'Fuck it. It's cheaper to pay out a few grieving families than it is to recall all those Pintos and fix them up so they're safe.' So yeah, it was the accountants, but the designers of the car had not done adequate (any?) safety testing.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
I have been making my living writing software for various automotive applications from BCMs to instrument clusters for about 15 years. I currently do advanced r&d for a tier 1. A recent project was to evaluate and document the major OSes and their applications in the telematics realm. The findings were what we usually find in selecting supporting software. Different OSes work in different situations. There is no clear path and different scenarios require different solutions much like the PC application domain. Outside of telematics like an instrument cluster our OSes consist of a while loop and not much more. The requirements from the OEMs dictate that the resources for auto apps are pretty small in order to keep the costs down. If they can shave a penny from cost you can bet an engineering change is coming your way. For instance, the last BCM we did had 256k of rom, 12k of ram. This includes compliance to foreign regulations on the same module. Meaning headlamp and horn behavior will be different outside the U.S.
I think the upshot for Linux is that it is a solid low cost alternative that will become more attractive as the cost to manufacture a higher end chip that supports a real OS goes down. Most people don't realize that your modern automobile has about 17 to 20 different computer systems. They all run apps of some sort. It would seem like a logical step to eventually combine some of these systems and control them with a real OS.
We'll see.
But netstumbler works by sending out broadcast packets to check for access points, which is likely to be illegal. Kismet is much better and will actually sniff traffic too (which is legal because its being broadcast) and won't transmit any data or try to connect to networks.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Good points. I think I'll try Kismet.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
We ain't perfect, but I work in the industry, and I do safety testing and watch as we do more after I'm done with major design. I dislike the insinuation that the majority of engineers don't care about safety, when the truth is that most of us do in fact want to make good products.
Most likely the flaw was discovered by Ford in testing, and they decided (accountant-wise, not engineer-wise) that it would be cheaper to pay off families than to scrap the design.
Again, I'm not saying we don't miss things, but I dislike the casting of aspersions on my profession when those aspersions are generally unwarranted.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
I'm sure that (now) there is adequate testing. But back in the day, there wasn't. The Pinto thing happened maybe 35 years ago, and you may not be old enough to remember it. Btw, I also work for a car company.
What a long, strange trip it's been.