Real Time on Moblin/Linux

International audienceThe automotive manufacturers are more than ever facing many challenges. With the tremendous involvement of electronics in the achievement of end-customers needs, automotive suppliers must accommodate themselves to the constantly changing features of carmakers. Infotainment is one of the most challenging fields, where the carmakers and suppliers realized that the use of a dedicated platform for each new car is no longer possible. This is why the GENIVI alliance was founded on March 2nd, 2009 with the goal of establishing an open platform for the automotive in-vehicle infotainment industry.GENIVI's strategy is to use Moblin as the baseline code within its reference implementation. Moblin is a Linux-based distribution designed for mobile devices and can perfectly be used in embedded devices such as those targeted by the infotainment industry.In this paper we experiment the real-time performances of Moblin as a standalone operating system and show how those performances can be improved by means of adding some customized real- time extensions. The main contribution of this work is to outline how those extensions are in fact necessary to comply with the real-time constraints required by automotive hosts on which infotainment applications are embedded