Adapted from a talk given at AMM Tokyo by Jerry Jiancong Zhao, Leader, AGL SDV Expert Group and Executive at Panasonic Automotive

TL;DR: Software-defined vehicles are among the most complex software-driven products humans have ever tried to build. No single company can build the entire stack alone. Since 2018, the AGL SDV Expert Group has engineered shared open source infrastructure: now called SoDeV. This reference platform gives the global automotive industry a common, vendor-neutral baseline to build upon. Jerry Zhao provides an honest overview of where this open infrastructure stands today and where it is heading.

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

In 1964 there were mainframes. Then came personal computers that anyone could put in their home or office. Feature phones gave way to smartphones. Mechanical watches became smartwatches tracking health and fitness. In these and other domains, products once defined by physical hardware eventually became defined by software.

That pattern is now arriving in automotive: and it is the largest and most complicated version of this shift yet. A Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) is not merely a smartphone on wheels. It ranks among the most complex software-defined products in industry today, carrying integration, real-time safety, and lifecycle update challenges that few other sectors have had to solve at this scale.

Even as software dominates overall product value, hardware is undergoing a concurrent renaissance. Artificial intelligence is making specialized silicon crucial again. Foldable phones, advanced camera arrays, and smart rings replacing smartwatches demonstrate that hardware and software exist in continuous creative tension. However, the software layer remains where the majority of product value is created and where industry-wide collaboration is most urgently required.

The Problem with Hardware-First Engineering

Traditional automotive engineering prioritizes hardware specification first, layering software on top over long lead times. This legacy approach creates slow value delivery cycles. By the time software is fully validated, the hardware it was written for may already be approaching obsolescence.

The SDV paradigm flips this sequence: software development must happen simultaneously with hardware, or even before the hardware is fully ready. This allows new features and capabilities to be delivered to vehicle owners far more quickly. Achieving this requires a fundamentally different architecture: one that decouples software from specific physical silicon so it can be developed, tested, and deployed independently across hardware generations.

Why Open Source, Why AGL, Why Now

The automotive software stack is simply too vast for any single company to construct internally. Attempting to build everything in-house leads to duplicated engineering effort, proprietary vendor lock-in, and unsustainable long-term maintenance burdens.

“The automotive product is so huge that no single vendor can do everything. So it’s very important that community work can be done to reduce over-competition on those things not necessary to duplicate with each other.”

This is the core philosophy behind AGL: build a common open source foundation collaboratively, then compete on the differentiated application layers built on top of it. The same technical logic that unified the Linux kernel community across competing hardware vendors must now be applied to the software-defined vehicle stack.

What SoDeV Is

SoDeV, the AGL SDV Reference Platform, is the concrete expression of this collaborative model. It is an open source reference platform focused specifically on guest domains: in Xen hypervisor terminology, the “Domain U” layers that require frequent updates, functionality modifications, and cross-variant reuse across vehicle generations.

The platform integrates components from across the AGL community and the broader Linux Foundation ecosystem:

• Unified HMI for modern, multi-display cockpit layouts
• VirtIO for standardized, hardware-agnostic device virtualization
• Xen Hypervisor for secure spatial and temporal domain isolation
• Yocto Project for custom, footprint-optimized embedded Linux distributions
• Zephyr RTOS for real-time, safety-critical execution environments

Target deployment domains include In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI), digital instrument clusters, gateway virtual machines, and mixed-criticality systems including ADAS and autonomous driving features running as isolated guest domains.

Initiated in 2018 with VirtIO standardization, the SDV Expert Group expanded its scope from traditional hypervisors to non-hypervisor, multi-OS, and cloud environments. SoDeV consolidates these years of community engineering into a single integration platform where companies can incubate and contribute new technology.

Three Phases: Realistic, Romantic, Fantastic

The strategic roadmap for SoDeV follows a three-tier framework that maintains clear distinction between production-near software and aspirational long-term architecture:

Realistic (Production-Near Work): Focuses on VirtIO-enabled IVI and cluster domains, Unified HMI integration, and reference hardware implementations. Active platform benchmarks include production IVI systems running on SoDeV, Renesas Sparrowhawk reference hardware integration, and virtualized hardware testbeds developed by Panasonic.

Romantic (Real-Time & Functional Safety): Extends SoDeV into real-time Linux, Zephyr RTOS, and safety-critical execution environments. Engineering standards for correctness and deterministic behavior are significantly higher here, encompassing advanced research into dedicated safety islands.

Fantastic (Cloud-Native Future): Represents the future horizon of automotive software: deeper cloud infrastructure integration, lightweight containerization via LXC (Linux Containers) and K3S (lightweight Kubernetes), and joint alignment with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Ecosystem Momentum and Community Contributions

SoDeV is not a single vendor’s proprietary initiative; it is the direct output of a broad ecosystem that includes Panasonic, AISIN, Renesas, Fujitsu, Honda, Toyota, Mazda, and EMQ.

On the safety and cluster domain, AISIN is contributing engineering work on functional safety and real-time requirements. On the Zephyr domain, Fujitsu is contributing through an internship program that brings new engineers into AGL development. Honda is working on extending Xen and VirtIO to include SoDeV use cases on Raspberry Pi 5, while Renesas is doing the same for their Gen 4 and Gen 5 hardware.

On the data infrastructure side, EMQ is working on contributing VeloRT (a lightweight MQTT broker) and VeloFlux (a lightweight data streaming processing engine) to AGL, aimed at filling gaps in AGL’s media and gateway data routing layers that the community has previously had to engineer around.

The underlying message across the industry is clear: the door is open. The SDV Expert Group welcomes new automakers, suppliers, software vendors, and independent developers. The realistic, romantic, and fantastic milestones of SoDeV will only be achieved by the community working together: never by any single vendor working in isolation.

If your team is working on software-defined vehicles, there’s a place for you in this effort. Visit the AGL SDV Expert Group to learn how to get involved, contribute to SoDeV, or bring your own use case to the table. You can also find the expert group in the #software-defined-vehicle channel on the AGL Discord server.