Linux in Automotive Environment

Abstract: A modern car contains many electronic devices communicating over a network in the car. Normallythese devices run special real-time operating systems. If a general purpose OS like Linux couldbe used on these devices, several benefits are gained. First, many development tools are alreadyavailable and it is more likely that developers have experience with known tools. Secondly, thesource code of Linux is licensed under the GPL license which means that it is available to view andmodify to the particular needs of the hardware being used. The purpose of this master thesis isto adapt Linux to run on a limited resource platform typical found in cars and optimize the boottime to meet the demands of the automotive industry. To meet the requirements, investigationof different techniques to reduce boot up time was explored and implemented. The most notabletechnique was to execute directly on the ash memory of the hardware that was used. Analysisof 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 ofcommunication, which is an improvement of the unoptimized kernel by 5.24 s but did not reachthe goal of 100 ms.