With the increasing momentum of electric, connected and self driving cars, the automotive industry is today experiencing a total revolution; consequently it is looking for new solutions to maintain the rapid pace of innovation that the market is demanding while keeping engineering costs under control. The implementation of the software defined vehicle, an autonomous connected automobile whose functions can be customized at run-time, demands an innovative software architecture that can easily scale and drastically reduce software time to market. Open source is certainly a way to create a fast-innovating ecosystem and to shorten software time to market. Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative project of The Linux Foundation, aspires to do this by building a de-facto industry standard Linux-based open software platform for automotive applications. However, the complexity of a software defined vehicle and extreme level of configurability requires a system architecture which is flexible, scalable and configurable at run-time. Virtualization is the technology capable of offering this in a secure and efficient way, thanks to its ability to host the isolated execution of different environments concurrently in a single hardware system. For this reason, virtualization is seen as the main software defined vehicle enabler providing the key differentiating factor for Tier-1 and OEM software products.
With this document the AGL Virtualization Expert Group (EG-VIRT), a team of virtualization professionals active in the AGL community, presents the AGL virtualized software defined vehicle architecture.
