[Centos-automotive-sig] [REPORT] Quarterly Report - CentOS Automotive SIG

Thu Aug 17 20:38:51 UTC 2023
Jeffrey Osier-Mixon <jefro at redhat.com>

August 2023 Quarterly report submitted by: Jefro Osier-Mixon, Red Hat -
chair
_____________________________________
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.

_____________________________________
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.

_____________________________________
Health report and general activity narrative

This SIG is intended to be a community effort with contributions and shared
benefits from all participants. The SIG typically has 1 public meeting per
month with 20-40 attendees, with visible participation from 7-10 separate
organizations. These meetings are usually held the first Wednesday of each
month. All formal meetings are recorded and posted on this page:
https://wiki.centos.org/SpecialInterestGroup/Automotive/Meetings

In addition, we maintain an active community discussion on Matrix (thanks,
Fedora!) here:
https://app.element.io/?updated=1.11.3#/room/#centos-automotive-sig:fedoraproject.org

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.

_____________________________________
Issues for the board to address, if any

None, keep up the excellent work :)

Jeffrey "Jefro" Osier-Mixon  |  jefro at redhat.com
Red Hat Office of the CTO  |  Sr. Principal Community Architect, Automotive
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