First Distribution of Linux to Meet Safety Standards to Arrive Later This Year

Red Hat is building an ecosystem around a new in-vehicle operating system based on Linux that has achieved functional safety certification.

Announced at the Red Hat Summit this week, the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System beginning in the third quarter of this year will become the first distribution of Linux to comply with the Safety Element out-of-Context (SEooC) framework as defined by the ISO 26262 Edition 2, 2018 of the Automotive Safety Integrity Level-B standard, says Francis Chow, vice president and general manager for the Edge Business Unit at Red Hat.

That certified platform is the first open source offering that meets the stringent risk management and safety requirements for in-vehicle, operator-critical computer systems, adds Chow. All previous efforts to certify a distribution have failed, say Chow

Additionally, the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System will also provide the foundation for an ecosystem of partners committed to building the next generation of software-defined vehicles that includes Arm, DXC Technology, ETAS, Intel Automotive, LG Electronics, NXP Semiconductor, Qorix GmbH, Qt Group, Sonatus, Tech Mahindra, Texas Instruments, Autoware Foundation and ThunderX, he adds.

The overall goal is to provide the automotive industry with a lower-cost platform for building in-vehicle applications without compromising safety and security, says Chow.

“We see the automotive industry is on the verge of going through a transformation,” he says.

Modern vehicles have become, for all intents and purposes, another type of platform for deploying software that just happens to move. In fact, there is now so much software embedded within vehicles today that it is not uncommon for there to be more than 200 million lines of code per vehicle, a number that is only going to increase exponentially as more compute horsepower running artificial intelligence (AI) software is incorporated into vehicles.

Most of that software is deployed on top of proprietary operating systems that comply with the SEooC framework. Red Hat is now making a case for replacing those operating systems with an open-source alternative that will be less costly to deploy in millions of vehicles. The challenge is that the quality of any software deployed in a vehicle needs to be of the highest grade possible because the lives of passengers might potentially be put at risk.

Of course, new vehicles only roll off the assembly line once a year, so it may be a while before the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System finds its way into a vehicle on the road. After all, it typically takes four or more years for a vehicle to move from design to production.

However, once distributions of Linux do find their way into vehicles, the pace at which software-defined vehicles can be built, deployed and updated should substantially improve. The challenge, as always, is building the ecosystem of application developers, engineers and system integrators required to manufacture what Red Hat hopes sometime later this decade will become the next generation of software-defined vehicles.