I hope to do a series of post on notable recent contributions, this is the first. I wanted to highlight a couple of recent developments to Persistence and to the integration of a browser into GENIVI based on the Chromium project which is Google's open source browser project. Persistent data is data that rests on the head unit between reboots and is a key mechanism in bringing personalization to the car since with this data you can create personalized playlists, settings and other in-vehicle experiences. The underlying mechanism to store data on the car in between use is not particularly glamorous, it's clearly the kind of non-differentiating software that every car needs if it wants to enable any personalization at all. This is why its good to see feedback on the GENIVI Persistence software from production projects, it brings a certain validation to the GENIVI design. Recent contributions from Delphi are worth highlighting here for their diligence and detail.

Chromium

You surely have heard of Google's Chrome browser, but have you heard that their Chromium project is an open source project developing, amongst other things, the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)? This is an exciting project since it brings "the infrastructure developers need to quickly add HTML rendering and JavaScript" functionality to the GENIVI Development Platform. This will allow GENIVI to do things like access lower level libraries and data via an app-like approach. After all, many "apps" are just HTML and JavaScript. With the addition of the CEF one will be able to also access APIs from the W3C for example and there is interesting contribution there from JLR and Volksvagen. If you want to follow the development as CEF makes its way into the GDP, you might look here: meta-genivi-dev/pull/53 repository. 

Important discussion on the project is also at Igalia's blog. Stay tuned here and in GENIVI's newsletter for more!

You may have noticed that Renesas has been rolling out a new third generation of R-Car SoCs starting with the H3 and M3 SoCs. Targeted at the Automotive Cockpit they form a part of the wider Renesas Automotive Product family.

As with the previous generations Renesas intends to support their use in Genivi platforms and to actively participate in Genivi itself. This includes maintaining a git repository containing a Yocto BSP with the changes required for the standard Yocto BSP to work with the Genivi Yocto Baseline (GYB) and Genivi Development Platform (GDP) already integrated.

Genivi 10

The first R-Car Gen 3 Yocto BSPs used YP 2.0 (Jethro) and s/w versions matched the requirements of Genivi 10. Therefore as a first step we have developed GYB and GDP support for both the Salvator-X Evaluation boards and M3 Starter Kit low cost board.

Genivi Yocto Baseline

Details of where to find the Genivi Yocto BSP for the boards and combine it with the Genivi Yocto Baseline can be found in the GYB section of the Renesas wiki page for Genivi 10.

GDP10

GDP10 was developed by the GDP team but never formally released. Updates are not accepted by the GDP Maintainers so as a service to the community we have integrated both Salvator-X and M3 Starter Kit support for GDP10 into our github.

You can find build instructions in the GDP section of the Renesas wiki page for Genivi 10.

Genivi 11

We are currently integrating Genivi 11 support and plan to release GDP-11 and GYB support in early February.

I blogged back in September of last year about R-Car Gen 2 Beta support for Genivi 11.

That support has been stable for several months. I have therefore merged the existing WIP (work in process) branch stevel/genivi-11-wip into a new product branch genivi-11-bsp-1.10.0. This new branch will be used for any future maintenance and has been set as the new default branch in github [1].

There are no other changes, i.e. no new commit to either branch.

[1] https://github.com/slawr/meta-renesas/tree/genivi-11-bsp-1.10.0