OpenSynergy has embarked on a year-long collaboration with Google and Qualcomm on a reference platform with a virtualised Android Automotive OS instance running on top of OpenSynergy’s COQOS Hypervisor SDK and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SA8155 automotive System on Chip (SoC).
The automotive sector is moving towards consolidating complex and heterogeneous hardware subsystems such as the instrument cluster, infotainment and head up display onto a single SoC. This enables tighter software integration between the subsystems, and allows for cost & weight savings.
Google is working on virtualising Android Automotive OS by leveraging and extending VIRTIO, an established virtualisation standard maintained by the OASIS consortium.
VIRTIO provides the transport layer and device models for essential computing devices such as block, network, console, GPU, and input. The DMA-like nature of the devices allows high-performance implementations as an alternative to hardware assisted I/O virtualisation models while still providing ease of implementation and safety.
“We are complementing our lean, OS- agnostic, type 1 hypervisor with the open-standard device sharing technology VIRTIO. We believe the time has come for the automotive industry to abandon proprietary solutions, to embrace open standards and compete on the quality of their implementation,” said Regis Adjamah, CEO of OpenSynergy.
By showing how Android Automotive OS can be deployed and ported without further modification on different SoCs and different hypervisors, the reference platform will help VIRTIO to expand its scope to the automotive domain.
VIRTIO provides maximum flexibility to OEMs and Tier 1 partners, enabling them to easily switch between SoCs, hypervisors and host/guest operating systems, to best match their needs.
Entelechy Asia 