January 2023 Quarterly report submitted by: Jefro Osier-Mixon, Red Hat -
chair
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Membership update
This SIG does not have a formal membership process. The mailing list
currently has 106 subscribers representing at least 32 organizations,
though not all subscribers use corporate emails and some are participating
as individuals.
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Releases in the most recent quarter (or most recent release, if none in
that quarter)
The Automotive SIG produces three types of artifacts:
- AutoSD, a streaming distribution of CentOS designed for in-vehicle
automotive use cases.
- An Automotive SIG RPM repository that allows the community to expand the
content of AutoSD or experiment with some of its parts.
- Sample images, built using OSBuild, which provide examples of how to
assemble production images based on AutoSD, customized for some hardware,
including container images, based on CoreOS/ostree technologies.
AutoSD, or Automotive Stream Distribution, is a streaming distribution for
automotive in-vehicle software development based on CentOS Stream. It
is transparently the upstream project for Red Hat's eventual in-vehicle OS
product. AutoSD has been downloaded and used by many organizations who have
commented or asked for help, so we know it is getting some traction though
of course we don't have exact metrics on usage.
In Q4 2022, we released a version of AutoSD compatible with the emerging
SOAFEE specification. SOAFEE (https://soafee.io) is an initiative driven by
Arm for the purpose of developing a reference specification for Arm-based
software-defined vehicles (SDVs) consisting of an operating system,
container orchestration strategy, and application layer. In addition, we
introduced a very lightweight container runtime based on podman and systemd
that does not include Kubernetes, as the latter represented a significant
performance hit on all relevant hardware. We presented at the Arm Developer
Summit in November on these topics.
In the coming quarter, we plan to tighten up documentation, begin a process
for accepting and supporting hardware enablement contributions, and
continue to develop AutoSD toward the SOAFEE specification while also
contributing to that specification within the SOAFEE community.
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Health report and general activity narrative
The SIG typically has 1 public meeting per month with 25-40 attendees, with
visible participation from 7-10 separate organizations. We have largely
given up on a separate office hours meeting due to attendance.
This SIG is intended to be a community effort with contributions and shared
benefits from all participants. All formal meetings are recorded and posted
on this page:
https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Automotive/Meetings
Several Red Hat employees made the initial contributions to the project as
well as the infrastructure required to build and test it. We occupy a
gitlab repository in the CentOS namespace building software regularly using
CI, with build instructions provided on the documentation page at
https://sigs.centos.org/automotive/ . Sample images are present and
downloadable along with customization and build instructions.
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Issues for the board to address, if any
None, keep up the excellent work :)
Jeffrey "Jefro" Osier-Mixon | jefro(a)redhat.com
Red Hat Office of the CTO | Sr. Principal Community Architect, Automotive
