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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• A radical architecture shift is coming to open-source car software.
• Updates and new features will reach cars faster with this change.
• Soon you’ll upgrade your car at home, similar to Tesla owners today.

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At Open Source Summit Japan, Dan Cauchy, executive director of Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), announced its new open-source platform for cars. Called SoDeV, this is a radical remodeling of how open-source software will be integrated into your next car.

Linux under the hood

Linux has long played a role in your car, sometimes literally under the hood. Today, car brands using Linux include not only Japanese companies such as Toyota, Honda, and Mazda, but also American and European manufacturers such as Tesla, Volkswagen, Ford, GM, and Mercedes-Benz. Indeed, today it’s hard to find a car maker that doesn’t use open-source software and Linux.

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In the past, Cauchy explained that today’s Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs) have dozens of electronic control units (ECUs), aka chips, and tightly coupled hardware-software stacks. This makes developing for cars and updating them slow and difficult.

"Today, every car model and year has its own specific software stack, and updating them requires you to go to the shop and have a technician update your car," said Cauchy.

These stacks are also large blocks of code. For even one small patch, the entire program must be replaced.

New containerized approach

With this new containerized approach, your car’s software can be fixed as needed with far less hassle.

SoDeV does this by enabling ECU consolidation and using virtualization, containerization, and hardware abstraction so that the same software stack can span multiple vehicle generations and hardware variants. This also means that you’ll be able to "update your car over-the-air [OTA] the same way you do your phone today," Cauchy said.

It does this by virtualizing everything in your car that’s controlled by a chip, which is pretty much everything. Instead of having code designed for use by just one hardware-specific chip, SoDeV virtualizes, say, all screens, so when an improvement is made to your primary display’s resolution, the same upgrade is applied to all your auto’s screens.

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AGL’s new platform leans on a familiar roster of automotive and cloud-native components, including containers, hypervisors, and real-time operating systems (RTOS).

According to Cauchy, SoDeV integrates the AGL Unified Code Base with technologies such as Linux containers, VirtIO for device virtualization, Xen and other open hypervisors, the Yocto Project for build customization, and the Zephyr RTOS.

Real tech for real car manufacturers

Put it all together, as Cauchy framed it, SoDeV is a reusable, production-oriented SDV foundation rather than a one-off demo stack. "This is real technology for real car manufacturers."

He also underscored the business capital behind SoDeV, with Panasonic Automotive Systems and Honda leading the initiative alongside the AGL SDV Expert Group, with additional contributions from Toyota, Mazda, AISIN, and Renesas. They all agree that an open, interoperable solution is the only sustainable way forward for SDVs.

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As Masashige Mizuyama, Panasonic Automotive Systems CTO, said in a follow-up keynote, "For the automotive industry to realize the potential of software-defined architecture, open and interoperable solutions are necessary."

He added: "By leveraging technologies like Unified HMI, device virtualization with VirtIO, and an open hypervisor, the AGL SoDeV Reference Platform decouples software implementation from hardware requirements. This enables software development teams to continuously work on platform development without being dependent on current or future hardware availability."

Coming fast

Unlike many car developments, where the gap between announcement and release can be over a decade, SoDeV is coming fast.

That’s because if car manufacturers want to keep selling cars in Europe, their new cars must be compliant with the European Union (EU) Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

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Specifically, cars’ software must be "secure by design and by default." That means they must have online patching to fix security problems as soon as they can be fixed. The CRA takes effect for the automobile industry on Dec. 11, 2027. Because of this drop-dead legal requirement, Cauchy explained, car vendors "will be able to be compliant with the CRA."

So, starting with the 2027 and 2028 car models, we’ll get software patches and updates OTA while our cars idle in the garage or driveway, the same way Tesla already does.

As someone who’s envied his Tesla-owning friends’ ability to get real improvements while listening to their radio instead of twiddling my thumbs in a garage, I’m looking forward to this new era of smart, open-source cars.