GENIVI Alliance compliance

The non-profit GENIVI Alliance (www.genivi.org) took a rather large step forward last week in its effort to drive adoption of an open source in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) development platform. The Alliance announced a compliance program to which four of its members have already signed on, as has the Linux Foundation.

Canonical (Ubuntu IVI Remix), Mentor Graphics (Mentor Embedded IVI Base Platform), MontaVista (MontaVista Automotive Technology Platform), and Wind River (Wind River Platform for Infotainment) have had their product offerings approved as GENIVI compliant, so they qualify for requests for proposals (RFPs) that require GENIVI-compliant products.

“Compliance is the major deliverable out of GENIVI, so this announcement is a real watershed event in the brief history of GENIVI as an alliance,” notes John Lehmann, Mentor Graphics’ product marketing manager for automotive IVI. “Automakers who are members of GENIVI are now specifying GENIVI compliance in their RFPs,” he adds. “Seven of them have adopted GENIVI into a project and there are two GENIVI implementations already in production. Movement in this direction is starting to develop at a very rapid clip.”

GENIVI provides a common infrastructure from the Linux kernel up to the middleware level, allowing application developers to customize their human-machine interface (HMI). The benefits of a common infrastructure include shorter development cycles and/or time-to-market and correspondingly lower costs.

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“Developers can leverage others for the base work and then add their unique value,” adds Canonical vice president Jon Melamut. “They can take advantage of newer chipsets and more modern operating systems and browsers. Regardless which way an OEM wants to go, they can take advantage of technologies that have been revved by thousands of people. In the past six months, GENIVI has come into all the discussions we’ve had about IVI, in a positive manner.”

Melamut notes that the GENIVI platform is available for both the Intel® Atom™ processor and ARM-based architectures, so applications can work with either architecture. The Ubuntu IVI Remix also supports Ubuntu One, a personal cloud service that enables users to access their personal media and stream their music from anywhere.