Date: 25/10/2012

Yocto Project added to Auto IVI software platform by Wind River

Wind River has added Yocto Project components into Wind River Platform for Infotainment. Utilizing Wind River Platform for Infotainment, customers can build a GENIVI-compliant automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform based on the Yocto Project development infrastructure and take benefit of open source for its capability for quick innovation.

With consumer electronics increasingly merging with the automobile, the auto industry is implementing open source to keep pace with constantly evolving technology. As automotive system complexities increase and the role of software becomes more vital, auto companies are searching for expertise to help deal with the challenges of integrating consumer electronics technologies while staying on schedule and budget. By offering a common build system and collaboratively developed technologies, the Yocto Project helps to establish a standard in the embedded market, helping developers to deliver embedded Linux systems more rapidly and easily.

“Given its ability to support a fast rate of innovation, open source in automotive continues to grow in popularity. However, properly integrating cutting-edge software with the complex auto environment, while trying to shrink time-to-market and costs, creates new challenges,” said Georg Doll, vice president of automotive solutions at Wind River. “With this in mind, Wind River is focused on offering a range of products, services and training on the latest open source advancements to meet the demanding and unique needs of the automotive industry.”

Wind River Platform for Infotainment is a GENIVI-compliant automotive software platform. The platform consists of reference boards supporting leading ARM processors, accompanied by integrated software development and test tools, along with Yocto Project toolchain components. As a maintainer of the Yocto Project IVI layer, Wind River developed two layers: meta-ivi and meta-systemd. The meta-ivi offers a reference build that is GENIVI-compliant and works with Yocto Project Compatible board support packages and other software and middleware layers. The meta-systemd holds systemd-specific package metadata. Being Yocto Project Compliant encourages collaborative development using a common set of tools and practices and ensures greater cross-platform compatibility and component interoperability.

Automotive expertise from Wind River covers a broad range of technologies and solutions, including Wind River Platform for Infotainment, Android, Tizen IVI as well as VxWorks, tools such as Wind River Diab Compiler, and virtualization and hypervisor technologies. This diverse expertise permits Wind River to support the auto industry in virtually any project.

Wind River automotive projects have included work with Magneti Marelli to create GENIVI-compliant IVI platforms and also telemetry devices running VxWorks for Formula One race cars. Leveraging its Android expertise, Wind River has collaborated with Clarion on Android-based IVI systems. Also, Wind River has worked with automotive industry supplier Continental, using Wind River Diab Compiler for its drive and vehicle control systems.

The Yocto Project, hosted by the Linux Foundation, is an open source collaboration project providing templates, tools and methods to help developers create embedded Linux-based systems, regardless of the hardware architecture. Wind River is a Yocto Project founding member and Gold member of the advisory board and actively holds key maintainer and technical lead positions. Available now, the update to Wind River Platform for Infotainment follows the recent introduction of the latest version of Wind River Linux, now based on the Yocto Project open source development infrastructure.

Source: Wind River
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N