Volkswagen's Bold Plan To Create a New Car OS (arstechnica.com) 63
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VW Group is now consolidating its software all under one new internal group, similar to the way that financial services or the ride-hailing Moia exist alongside individual vehicle brands. And that means in the future, a single unified automotive OS will run on everything from a VW Polo to an Audi A8. With thoughts of existing infotainment operating systems like Android, Automotive Grade Linux, or QNX, I asked Christian Senger, who is responsible for VW Group's Digital Car and Services division, to clarify. "What is an operating system in the automotive world? Today we have an extremely different setup if it's infotainment, if it's the chassis, the powertrain," Senger explained, and that has led to some odd critical dependencies in some cars. For instance, some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function. "Whenever we exchange something, we have an impact on everything. What we are now doing with these so-called enabling functions is taking them out of customer functions, putting it in a middleware software layer. And this is what we call an operating system," he explained.
Eventually, that's going to mean a single software stack common across VW Group's vehicles -- everything from the instrument displays and the infotainment to powertrain and chassis management (think traction and stability control or advanced driver assistance systems), plus a common connected car infrastructure and cloud. However, each brand will still get to develop its own UX in the same way that Porsche and Audi can build very different-looking vehicles from the same MLB Evo toolbox. Senger also revealed that VW Group will be using Android for future versions of the MIB infotainment platform, in large part because of the robust third-party app ecosystem with that OS versus Linux. However, it will be a while yet before the full effects of this strategy are felt. Senger says that the as-yet unnamed organization should be fully staffed -- somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 employees -- by 2025.
Eventually, that's going to mean a single software stack common across VW Group's vehicles -- everything from the instrument displays and the infotainment to powertrain and chassis management (think traction and stability control or advanced driver assistance systems), plus a common connected car infrastructure and cloud. However, each brand will still get to develop its own UX in the same way that Porsche and Audi can build very different-looking vehicles from the same MLB Evo toolbox. Senger also revealed that VW Group will be using Android for future versions of the MIB infotainment platform, in large part because of the robust third-party app ecosystem with that OS versus Linux. However, it will be a while yet before the full effects of this strategy are felt. Senger says that the as-yet unnamed organization should be fully staffed -- somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 employees -- by 2025.
Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, QNX is pretty slick. I was using it back in the 1980s on 8086-based hardware and it is an incredibly lean architecture with totally deterministic realtime performance and an unbeatable message-based IPC which allows you to create incredibly robust mission-critical systems. Its maturity, reliability and performance will be *very* hard to reproduce from scratch in the timeframes likely to be imposed on such a project.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. Or in other words, they will not be able to do that. But they may try again and again and if they get really good people to work on this, they may make it on the 2nd or 3rd try. Of course, if they go with young, cheap coders, they will most assuredly fail.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Insightful)
They'll use cheap coders, and ones that haven't worked within the limits of having to deliver rock solid code, period.
Instead, those coders will be used to CI/CD, not 'develop for months, then push a 100% solid version after a year of testing". Software like this needs to be put in place once, almost never updated, rock solid, and never fixed with little "Oh, I should update that to fix that little bug" moments.
What grinds my gears is that cars even have infotainment systems, with access to the rest of the car at all. I don't WANT anything with wireless access, to have access to the CAN/whatever network bus that also has access to a my Bosch ABS / brakes controller, or my throttle, or my steering or anything else! Infotainment, if wireless/4G/bluetooth, should have access to one thing.. speakers. And mic. That's it.
I sure as hell don't want my car's firmware to be remotely updatable. Last thing I need is some asshat updating the firmware, so my brake "work better", meaning they suddenly behave differently when I go to use them. Or implementing a new bug in the steering controller.
Or better yet, I don't need my car to stop working because war broke out, or some trade dispute, or some cold/warmer war breaks out, and now everyone's car and trucks won't start... or l/r are reversed for steering randomly. Because sure as hell, China/NSA/everyone has examined current cars, and has hackboxes ready to go, to destroy things like transportation at a moment's notice.
Yeah, let's take everything vital to survival, to democracy, like cars, voting, farming equipment, power infrastructure, communications, news algorithms, all of it... and just use computers for it.. and then design security like a joke at the same time.
Because, you know.. awesome!
You shouldn't buy new cars (Score:2)
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I've had the same car for a long time now. There would be some advantages to a newer model, but for me they are still outweighed by the dangers of poor decisions and careless implementations of all the new technologies.
I would upvote the GP AC a hundred times if I could. Remote-accessible infotainment systems and other conveniences simply don't mix with safety-critical systems for controlling a fast-moving chunk of metal with lives at stake. It should be laughable to think that it could be possible to remot
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The brakes and steering are, for now, still mechanical devices. You can't reverse the steering with software.
Both still work even with the engine turned off, but with more effort needed since you lose the assistance.
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QNX has always been an excellent embedded OS. It may not have the development tools of Linux, but it is a realtime OS, which is a critical thing when you are talking about embedded stuff, where missing a packet on a wire can cause injury or death.
I wish VW would make their OS F/OSS. That way, it would be a well supported RTOS that is useful. There are other RTOS variants out there, but they either are commercial, or have no heavy development support behind them.
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think it would be hard for VolkswagenOS to compete against QNX at all. All they have to do is make a policy that all their vehicles have to run VWOS. That IS the reason they're developing it, after all. It's not like this is going to be a large part of their future revenue stream, if it's going to be marketed outside of VW at all.
Now the question I have is will it be reliable enough that I want to have controlling my automobile?
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If they're not even going to be fully staffed until 2025 then QNX isn't their competition. Unless this is some executive pipe dream to try to pump up share prices (not likely, a car O/S doesn't normally excite speculators) they're looking at a complete rewrite of how their integrated electromechanical systems work. QNX is great if you goal is to manage a bunch of disparate cobbled-together pieces and security is a vague afterthought, but that whole model isn't going to be manageable much longer and I'd be
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They'd better hurry though, the labor pool of programmers with experience building and testing real-time systems is shrinking as they retire, and they're not training many replacements.
Where did you get this idea? Embedded systems have long been one of the biggest parts of the programming industry.
It's true that you won't often read much about them in trendy blogs about Agile methods and Continuous Deployments and cloud-hosted, auto-updating, privacy-compromising, MVP-level quality, SAAS junk. The people writing them are too busy making stuff work and stopping you dying.
But just stop for a second and think how many devices with embedded firmware were used just for you to read this Slashdo
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Middleware doesn't compete against operating systems. ;-)
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It's not QNX that you compete with in the car industry, it's the Autosar environment.
Being involved in the vehicle development domain I'd say that the operating system is completely irrelevant when doing vehicle design though, it's that the system architects in the car industry don't have any real vehicle knowledge but spreads out functionality in a pattern that adheres to a completely academic model with no consideration for when functionality shall be alive, malfunctions and loss of service coverage (GPS,
Re:Good luck (Score:4, Interesting)
There's multiple examples, although many are just for some portion of a vehicle (such as infotainment) rather than the whole vehicle. It seems what Volkswagen is talking about is moving to what Tesla already does, where a single (compartmentalized, and variously redundant) system controls everything. Not a particularly "bold plan", but rather, a necessary one. The lack of systems integration in vehicles has been a huge and growing impediment to adding capabilities, system mass, power consumption, installation cost, etc etc - and it gets worse the more complicated that modern vehicles get. It's been a difficult transition, however, because normally if you want some capability you just buy some "box" from some third-party supplier. You don't control the whole chain.
It seems increasingly that Diess is taking the entire Tesla gameplan, from gigafactories to vertical integration. Kudos to him for that. :)
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For any industrial control application (and car control is that) you want a hard-core real-time OS. The Linux kernel at the core of Android may eventually get there, but it will still take quite some time. I am currently using a BB Z10 (with basically QNX as its OS), and the snappiness and responsiveness is much, much better than Android on a more powerful core.
Eventually, Linux will get there, no doubt and the RT patches are currently getting integrated. Then you need the coders to learn how to do this. Th
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I am currently using a BB Z10 (with basically QNX as its OS), and the snappiness and responsiveness is much, much better than Android on a more powerful core.
There's a pretty decent chance that this has almost nothing to do with the kernel.
Re:Good luck (Score:5, Informative)
Good luck competing against BlackBerry's QNX [qnx.com] which is currently installed in over 50% of all vehicles produced today. Yes THAT BlackBerry.
Those statistics are terribly out of date.Most current generation headunits are converging towards GenIVI/AGL based Linux. The other modules (PCM, BCM, RCM, etc.) don't actually run an OS in most cases as they are microcontrollers.
VWs actual problem is caused by the 10km of wiring found in a car and by the lack of standardisation across the industry. CAN as a bus is standardised, but the messages sent across it are not standardised even across the same generation of products from the same vendor. Obviously, that means that they require special software builds and testing for each vehicle, locale, etc.
Tesla is making interesting changes to this architecture in the near future in order to simplify the wiring in a car.
I've recently "ported" a Mazda CMU entertainment system to a mid 2000s Subaru Forester SG. The wiring sheet *SPECIFICALLY* for the CMU multimedia system was printed on 5 A3 pages glued together. The new generation CMU from Mazda is a bit more interesting as it is a bit more modular with components shared with other Japanese brands. Right now Subaru is the only one still using QNX, but they are switching to AGL as well.
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don't actually run an OS in most cases as they are microcontrollers.
They absolutely run an OS. Anything new is running an AUTOSAR compatible OS.
Specifications are available for AUTOSAR.
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and autosar, too.
that has a huge install base and the car company I work for is going to be converting to it big-time, very soon.
I like linux a lot, but I'm seeing it become less relevant. mostly due to security risks, to be honest.
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Good luck competing against BlackBerry's QNX [qnx.com]
Good luck reading TFS.
Disdain narrow corporate boundaries of debate (Score:2)
Volkswagen, a software proprietor and car manufacturer famous for exploiting a diesel testing regime and selling environmentally harmful cars that wouldn't have otherwise passed the relevant tests, is telling corporate media that they want to unify car OSes. The harm those cars posed didn't just adversely affect the cars ostensible owners, but anyone who breathed the air around the vehicles as well. Why does VW want this? Because "roughly eight different electronic architectures" is considered too many. Vol
*blank look* (Score:5, Insightful)
"For instance, some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function..."
*bangs head on desk*
Re:*blank look* (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why we don't work if we don't get free lunch.
Re:*blank look* (Score:5, Interesting)
I am not. But I run into these people all the time. And then I run into "management" that does not understand how incredibly cheap a competent, experienced non-amateur actually is (even at 4x the cost per hour or higher) compared to the amateurs.
For example, I recently came up with a superior and easier solution for a problem literally in 3 minutes that some other guys had banged their head against for at least a week and probably longer. And while I am pretty good, anybody competent should not have taken more than a day to find the solution that I proposed. But what you usually find is people that are completely helpless if you just move out a tiny bit from their core competences. These are people that already struggle coding for high-level very abstract interfaces and when only a bit of understanding what is hiding behind these interfaces is required, they are completely lost and cannot get anywhere anymore.
This is completely ridiculous. The advantage I had compared to these other people with several years of web-application development is that I actually know what can be put into a HTTP request and response header. And I am not even a web-coder at all, I just spent a few hours finding out when I started doing this overall project because I (like any good engineer) believe in understanding the base-mechanisms and border conditions. "Profession of amateurs" sums up most coders pretty nicely.
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And this is an issue in large part because of the divorce between "management" and everyone else that took place with the explosion of the MBA programs in the 1970s. If one ran an important company prior to that time the normal path was to start low and move up through the ranks. By the time one reached the Executive Suites they had at least a handle on what the other people below them did. Even Henry Ford made Edsel work the assembly line for a year (and complained bitterly about having to pay his union
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I am utterly floored.
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They seem to run just fine with or without the Emissions Data Manipulation Module (EDMM) though.
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Indeed. No actually good engineers involved in the decision making here, obviously. It is like they never heard of things like ntpd or redundancy. This is a _solved_ problem. It is just not a problem amateurs and average coders can really handle competently.
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Sounds like miscommunication at best, or another vehicle company on my blacklist.
I'm not aware of any operation-critical module on a vehicle that requires vehicle-level time synchronization to function. My company develops engine controllers, body controllers, brake controllers, vehicle supervisory controllers, battery controllers, etc. Basically everything that makes the vehicle move. While I have seen requirements for using real-time stamps for diagnostics, I have never seen a requirement that puts vehi
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Owning and working on just one modern VAG product should be sufficient to cure you of wanting to dick with them ever again. Hell, mine is a 99 and that is new enough to be a clusterfuck.
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I'm not aware of any operation-critical module on a vehicle that requires vehicle-level time synchronization to function.
I'll just say this; for ADAS level 4, you will see ALL cars having iee1588 (PTP) level of time sync. likely 2 grandmasters in the car and ptp-capable NICs and switches.
this is real.
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"For instance, some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function..."
*bangs head on desk*
Side effect of changes coming in 2020 when Eu makes it mandatory for all new cars to have the fucktard Ford idea to feed the speed limit from the stereo GPS into the engine and force you to step on the gas to the metal to override it. Nothing we can do about it. We now have to trust our lives to imbecilic moronic cretins like Pioneer which in 2019 cannot order Mp3 tracks correctly by metadata and which are already allowed to connect to the engine via OBD: https://primus.kot-begemot.co.... [kot-begemot.co.uk]
Re: (Score:1)
It's hard to take you seriously when you claim to be allergic to chicken that ate wheat instead of corn, because gluten:
From your website that you linked to:
My allergy is at "peanut" intensity. It is literally off the scale. I can feel the difference when a chicken has been grown eating wheat (that makes me sick) or corn (I can actually eat that one). The residual proteins in the meat from the chicken being fed wheat are sufficient to trigger it.
Boy who cried wolf. You are full of shit. Also water, but don't let science interfere with your fantasy world.
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You used to be able to order a Porsche (for example) in the US without an "entertainment" unit of any kind (think people who race cars for fun and/or profit). However, now that backup cameras are mandatory in the US, they MUST ship an entertainment unit with all cars (otherwise there would be no screen for the camera).
You also could buy a car without air conditioning, but now because all vendors (that I know of) use the AC as part of the defrost setting on the climate control, you can't do that either.
This
"Bold" plan? Just spending lots of money (Score:5, Insightful)
I can understand the desire to consolidate to a single OS for all of VW's vehicles to simplify and regulate the addition of new software modules as well as hardware into the vehicles.
I know the natural approach is to come up with something in house but anybody who suggests that clearly hasn't thought things through. If you think that a cash rich company can create OS's on demand, think of IBM's VM/OS and Microsoft's Windows 95. Both years late in terms of delivery at an unbelievable cost both in terms money and the companies reputations because of issues with the quality of the end product - and creating OS's was arguably the two companies centre of competence. I would think it would be a stretch for a car company to develop this expertise in house and developing to a schedule required imposed by new vehicle releases.
It makes much more sense to adapt an OS that is currently out there. QNiX has been suggested in a previous post and it is used in many vehicles - along with some Porsche cars, which is VW, products. I imagine that there are other OS's that could be adapted as VW's base at a (let's be honest) comparable cost to what VW's looking to invest but with much less danger of serious schedule slippage and security/quality issues that will take years to nail down.
Re:"Bold" plan? Just spending lots of money (Score:4, Insightful)
But as time rolls on, the domain becomes more accessible, and that's really what this is all about. It seems silly to me to compare what MS had to do with Win95 with a car OS, both difference in time and in scale of functionality.
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I know the natural approach is to come up with something in house but anybody who suggests that clearly hasn't thought things through.
The article doesn't say that they will be developing the OS in-house. Their plan is just to consolidate all the software for different cars in one group. That group may then decide to license existing software.
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They are not trying to create a desktop OS that is everything to everybody, that supports both a massive set of devices and a rich API for application development, and that is required to maintain stability for all eternity. They are trying to write an embedded OS where they control the devices, where the API is tailored precisely to what they need, and stability is not an issue since they control the entire stack.
It also seems to me they are actually talking about the layer directly above the kernel, sugge
At least as complicated as a desktop OS (Score:3)
Actually, I would argue that they *are* " trying to create a desktop OS that is everything to everybody, that supports both a massive set of devices and a rich API for application development, and that is required to maintain stability for all eternity."
Have looked at the range of vehicles that are built by VW? They all have different:
- Display technologies, number of displays and display resolutions
- User Input devices
- Different User IO including Android, iPhone, Huawei's new OS connecting through differ
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And yet, compared to the set supported by Windows or Linux, that's still a small set of known devices. It's also not being positioned as a platform on which 3rd parties can run software.
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A VW OS will most likely be linux based.
Boldly going ... are they gone yet? (Score:4, Funny)
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Try and fool me three times kiss my ass, get the f**k out and don't come back. You already have what you deserve. Heil Merkler.
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Re: Boldly going ... are they gone yet? (Score:2)
who is Merkler?
Angela Merkel => Merkle => Merkler, Adolf Hitler's daughter. Look closely at their photos. If you can't or won't see the resemblence, there's not much I can do for you.
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It's really funny how VW's and other Germans's 21st century "green vehicle" was a .. diesel. VW with a straight face offered to buy a diesel car as an alternative to a Prius.
Makes sense (Score:2)
All those engineers who'd previously been employed programming diesel emissions testing cheats need a new challenge.
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Different group. The fraudsters where Winterkorn's disciples (an engine expert himself, so it is completely clear what was going on). These people do other software.
Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
Today we have an extremely different setup if it's infotainment, if it's the chassis, the powertrain," Senger explained, and that has led to some odd critical dependencies in some cars. For instance, some models simply won't run if the infotainment system is broken; the navigation GPS provides the vehicle's master time counter, and without that, the powertrain won't function.
Translation: We've realized that buying everything off the self and doing nothing in house has been the stupidest idea ever. Its the same thing with the outsourcing businesses have done; the chickens come home to roost eventually.
That said, what VW is trying to do here is still going to be a shit show if I had to make any wagers. They don't want to do this themselves, hence why they are pitching it as a "OS for all cars" -- they want to recruit the other manufacturers and try and spread the cost out. The problem is these are all old companies and they got themselves into this mess in the first place because of bean counters, so whats to say that won't happen again with this. Every company will want their own little bit in this new OS and the whole thing will get bogged down. The last line in the summary should be the best indicator of this.
Senger says that the as-yet unnamed organization should be fully staffed -- somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 employees -- by 2025.
Re:Translation (Score:5, Insightful)
Senger says that the as-yet unnamed organization should be fully staffed -- somewhere between 5,000 to 10,000 employees -- by 2025.
I think I see failure right there. They should get 20 really competent people instead (and who cares if they make 1M per year each) and then another 100 people to support them. That way this may actually work.
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The problem is that VW (and in fact all German brands) have no idea how to make electronics. That job is contracted out to Bosch (for pcm, abs, glow controllers, most sensors, etc.) And Bosch has been fucking worthless since the nineties or so. Their hardware used to be bulletproof, now it is pathetically fragile. Of the Germans, only Mercedes manufactures their own gearboxes for the majority of models. BMW and VW just buy them from ZF (which has also gone downhill, but frankly was never that great.)
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What brand does know how make electronics?
I was always kind of the impression that a lot of things were just outsourced to somebody else, and some of the outsource providers like Delphi used to be part of car brand (GM in this case).
I also assumed this phenomenon has grown, with carmakers buying more complete assemblies for things like headlights and side mirrors and climate control, especially has non-luxury cars are almost as feature-packed as luxury cars were 10 years ago.
I had a Volvo S80 with an engine
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"What brand does know how make electronics?"
Ford still does. GM did but they sold most of that stuff off. Tesla does.
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What brand does know how make electronics?
Lucas Electric.
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What brand does know how make electronics?
Magneti Marelli.
Stupid plan (Score:1)
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Multiple installations of the same OS would be workable. There's no reason that one network and one computer need do it all except that manufacturers don't care about quality and put cost above everything else.
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You havent solved the problem. You have multiplied the problem and made it worse.
Fun fact: most programmers have no clue what a real-time OS even is. No, it does not mean "light weight."
Cheating OS? (Score:2)
I doubt that anybody will ever trust VW software ever again after the last fiasco.
Re-inventing the automobile wheel (Score:2)
I'm sure systemd or emacs (or both) do all this already.