Linux in Automotive Environment

A modern car contains many electronic devices communicating over a network in the car. Normally these devices run special real-time operating systems. If a general purpose OS like Linux could be used on these devices, several benefits are gained. First, many development tools are already available and it is more likely that developers have experience with known tools. Secondly, the source code of Linux is licensed under the GPL license which means that it is available to view and modify to the particular needs of the hardware being used. The purpose of this master thesis is to adapt Linux to run on a limited resource platform typical found in cars and optimize the boot time to meet the demands of the automotive industry. To meet the requirements, investigation of different techniques to reduce boot up time was explored and implemented. The most notable technique was to execute directly on the ash memory of the hardware that was used. Analysis of what times that was interesting to measure and how to reliably measure these times was performed. The result from this thesis was a kernel that in 190 ms was ready to execute this kind of communication, which is an improvement of the unoptimized kernel by 5.24 s but did not reach the goal of 100 ms