A useful tool when developing an Automotive Infotainment is a screen to view the User Interface. Recently work has been done to support the official Raspberry Pi 2 7" touch screen, as seen here: raspberry-pi-7-touchscreen-display.

If you build automotive infotainment systems, you know that the integration of hardware and software is a key differentiation. In building the GDP we don't have the resources for custom designed hardware so instead we use COTS or common off the shelf technologies. In fact the GDP supports a number of peripherals almost entirely by contributors.

The RPi touchscreen has required a bit of work to get it to work with the GDP, namely drivers in the RPi. Leon Anavi as well as GDP maintainers worked to bring in the needed software and configuration which inevitably led to upstream. Once an open source driver was brought into Linux mainline, the next step has been ensuring that the Graphical tools used by GENIVI, namely Wayland and the Wayland IVI Extension, work on the screen.

While continued discussion is happening on using the screen with GDP 11, it should be ready for everyday use with both the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3. Use the links I've provided to follow along with the collaboration with many parts of our community as we continue to support widely available and popular hardware running the GDP.

Developer summary

I recently pushed Genivi 11 support for the Renesas R-Car Gen 2 boards to github.

URL: https://github.com/slawr/meta-renesas.git

branch: genivi-11-wip

The branch is a WIP but actually feels very close to a release candidate.

Developer Notes

The support is based on the same Yocto BSP v1.10 release used for Genivi 10 and there are no changes to the BSP components.
Changes were limited to adoptions to the krogoth (YP 2.1) branches used by the Genivi Yocto Baseline and of course meta-ivi 11.
Functionally the Poky meta implementation of libdrm is now used.

In summary there have been the following major changes:-

• Support gtk+3 v3.18.8 used in YP 2.1
• Support systemd v299 used in YP 2.1
• Support gst 1.6.x used in YP 2.1 when h/w acceleration is disabled.
• Support mesa 11.x used in YP 2.1. Update configuration (disable libgbm) to fix do_populate_sysroot() error
• Fix omx-user-module QA issue in do_populate_sysroot() related to .la files
• No longer use Renesas libdrm fork
• Fix build error related to linux-libc-headers
• Drop ncurses bbappend as functionality now upstream
• Drop unused gcc 4.8 bbappend

For those who like a graphical diff compared to Genivi 10 you can find a Github compare here.

The following sections provide some more detail including a migration guide.

General information about building Genivi 11 Miranda for the Renesas R-Car SoCs, including build instructions for the Genivi Yocto Baseline and links to GDP can be found in the Renesas Genivi 11 page.

Migration Guide / Behavior changes

• No changes to the BSP components.

See the Genivi 10 Migration Guide to be reminded of some functional improvements in the previous release.

Testing

The update has been successfully tested with Genivi Yocto Baseline 11 M-02 and the GDP Master RC-1 release for Genivi 11.

Pull request #44 is pending for GDP-11 RC-1 to align the GDP Master branch with this release. The GDP Maintainers tell me they are about to merge it.

Earlier in July GENIVI received configuration for the GENIVI Development platform to run on another popular development board. This time it was Qualcomm’s Dragon Board. This board uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor and includes things like bluetooth and GPS and seems quite well suited to running automotive software. I'm including a screen shot below from GitHub showing how Changhyeok Bae and Tom Pollard spun the new board up. Since GENIVI uses build-from-source build tools, namely Yocto and Baserock, we're able quickly port GDP to new hardware as long as there is a fairly recent kernel available for the hardware. 

We look forward to more silicon joining the stable and a warm welcome to the Dragon board!