By Naoto Yamaguchi
The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) Japan team hosted the “Software Defined Vehicle Accelerated by Open Source” track at COSCUP 2026, held August 8–9 in Taipei, Taiwan (co-located this year with UbuCon Asia). The track focused on sharing and discussion with contributors, users, and promoters across Asia’s open source community, with seven speakers presenting on open source automotive technology. The activity was a great success thanks to the many supporters, speakers, attendees, and COSCUP staff who made it possible.
This marks the third year the AGL Japan team has participated in COSCUP, and the second year we’ve hosted this specific track. The track received strong support from Mac Taylor, a COSCUP engagement staff member, whose help was instrumental in making it happen again this year.
A common thread running through this year’s track was SoDeV, AGL’s open source reference platform for Software Defined Vehicles. SoDeV takes a software-first approach, using a hypervisor-based host environment with hardware-decoupled guest VMs connected via VirtIO, with the goal of becoming a de facto standard for how the industry builds SDV platforms. It came up across several talks, including Ishii-san’s overview of AGL’s recent evolution, Yamaguchi-san’s work on making SoDeV environments more reproducible, Kurokawa-san’s talk on BSP design and hypervisor challenges, and Tokita-san’s work on Zephyr-based driver domains, and it anchored both demos at the booth: SoDeV on Raspberry Pi 5 and the Linux/Zephyr mixed-criticality demo.
One particular highlight was the talk from Flo Wohlrab of OpenHW Group. He spoke about the importance of collaboration across the entire ecosystem, not just within open source, a theme that resonated well with the growing collaboration between AGL and other communities.
Talks
Software Defined Vehicles: Innovations Through Open Source Collaboration: Jiancong Zhao (“Jerry”), AGL Japan team Jerry gave an overview of the open source alliances (including AGL, ELISA, SOAFEE, Eclipse, COVESA, and AUTOSAR) working together to accelerate SDV development. As leader of the AGL SDV Expert Group, Jerry shared the group’s vision, roadmap, and current activities toward building common SDV platforms, aiming to spark further collaboration between the automotive open source community and COSCUP attendees.
Automotive Grade Linux: An Open Source Platform Evolving Toward Software-Defined Systems: Hiroyuki Ishii, AGL Japan team Ishii-san walked through AGL’s evolution over the past year, focusing on two initiatives: SoDeV, a reference platform exploring software-first development through virtualization and hardware abstraction (built on projects like Xen, Zephyr, and VirtIO), and AGL Assessment Automation (AAA), which brings cloud-native security and supply-chain practices to automotive-scale supply chains.
Eclipse SDV: Building Worldwide SDV Ecosystems and Why Open Source May Not Be Enough: Flo Wohlrab, OpenHW Group
Mission Impossible? How to Realize a Reproducible and Flexible System Integration Method for SoDeV: Naoto Yamaguchi, AGL Japan team Yamaguchi-san focused on reproducibility: AGL’s Yocto-based toolchain already supports host/guest co-build through its “multiconfig” feature, but the configuration complexity is a real barrier for both SoDeV developers and users. He shared his investigation and early ideas for addressing this.
BSP Design for SDVs: Hypervisor and Virtualization Challenges in Decoupling: Harunobu Kurokawa, AGL Japan team Kurokawa-san looked at hardware decoupling through hypervisors, with Xen as the key technology for isolation. He shared the real-world challenges of bringing an open source hypervisor to ARM automotive platforms (BSP dependencies, boot flow complexity, Device Tree configuration, memory constraints) and demonstrated a hardware implementation combining Xen, AGL, and Zephyr RTOS using VirtIO for device abstraction.
Using Zephyr to Build Smaller Driver Domains for Virtualized Vehicle Systems: Hiroshi Tokita, AGL Japan team Tokita-san presented his work running Zephyr as a Xen driver domain within SoDeV, taking advantage of Zephyr’s broad device support and small footprint for compact, well-isolated domains. He covered practical challenges like hardware partitioning and shared resources, and demonstrated Zephyr’s DomD support live on the Renesas/Retronik Sparrow-Hawk V4H board and Raspberry Pi 5.
Open Source in Action: Pioneering Open-Source SDV in Real World Production: Jaylin Yu, AGL community Drawing on three OEM projects, Jaylin shared hard-won lessons from deploying open source SDV in production, spanning in-vehicle performance tuning, transmission-prioritization methods for reliable safety-critical data delivery, CI/CD for mission-critical OSS, and using fuzzing to proactively guard against intrusion.
Demo Booth
The AGL Japan team, led by Keiya Nobuta, exhibited a demo booth over the two-day event, showing three demos:
- SoDeV on Raspberry Pi 5: SoDeV was originally developed on the Renesas R-Car V4H Sparrow-Hawk board. That work has now been extended to Raspberry Pi 5, making it easier for any developer to get started. This was the first public exhibition of the Raspberry Pi 5 demo.
- Linux and Zephyr Guests on SoDeV Architecture: Zephyr receives a CAN message and illuminates a warning LED, demonstrating a mixed-criticality use case on SoDeV.
- AGL Flutter Demo IVI on RISC-V: AGL is not tied to any specific CPU architecture, and this demo, running the Flutter-based IVI on RISC-V, shows that portability in action.
Looking Ahead
Thanks again to everyone who spoke, stopped by the booth, or helped organize this year’s track. We’re looking forward to bringing AGL back to COSCUP again next year.
