August 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 117 subscribers representing at least 32 organizations, though not all subscribers use corporate emails and some are participating as individuals. Anecdotally, we have noticed more diverse participation from both automotive companies and non-automotive use cases, including both rail and aviation. We also hosted a guest presentation from IoT.bzh, a consultancy in France who is using the CentOS Automotive SIG repos as an upstream for their own product called Redpesk, which we see as a great benefit to the community.
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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.
Starting in Q4 2022, we support 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 last two quarters, we have tightened up documentation, continued work on 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. We have also launched an image supporting Eclipse SDV projects, now including Eclipse eCAL and Eclipse Velocitas, soon to include other projects. This quarter we are also introducing a new Arm platform into our build & test matrix (ADLINK AVA automotive platform) and hope to incorporate other hardware in the future.
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 :)