3 ms·

My router has dual firmware partitions, the fact a car doesn’t is inexcusable

KennyBlanken 3y ago
It should be mandated, but corporations dominate legislation and regulations. "You'll drive up costs for the hard-working American consumer" "We'd have to cut salaries or fire factory workers" "We wouldn't be able to compete against that car company from Nothereistan!" etc.
g_p 3y ago
Absolutely. One fact I recall from many years ago (so I don't know how true it is now) is that auto makers were shipping 7 year old silicon (and thus board support packages for their software). The guys working on chips and CPUs were writing software and it wouldn't hit the road for 7 years. This was why infotainment systems lagged the state of the art for so long - they were apparently shipping components that would have belonged in a smartphone from more than half a decade before. In this case, I believe we had a few phones get A/B updates by Android 7, which was late 2016. Giving it a year or so to filter to more CPU chipsets, that would mean (if the old rule held true), we would expect to see A/B hitting new cars in the next year or two. This assumes auto makers are using enough of the Android BSP to get the bootloader with A/B (which isn't a given), and then that they use it! Anyone with any experience of auto software know if the teams doing software are experienced and understand the platform side of things, or if it's a traditional front-end heavy "crunch release" type affair? I've seen some pretty poor quality infotainment systems in the past, so my assumption is inexperienced devs with limited platforms knowledge, focused on "get it working to ship it", but would be interesting to hear from anyone with experience of how this really goes down.
justsomehnguy 3y ago
It was a great advantage, both in marketing and the real usage, when the motherboards started to support the Dual BIOS (GIGABYTE term, AFAIR). 2003 I think?

It should be mandated, but corporations dominate legislation and regulations. "You'll drive up costs for the hard-working American consumer" "We'd have to cut salaries or fire factory workers" "We wouldn't be able to compete against that car company from Nothereistan!" etc.

g_p 3y ago

Absolutely. One fact I recall from many years ago (so I don't know how true it is now) is that auto makers were shipping 7 year old silicon (and thus board support packages for their software). The guys working on chips and CPUs were writing software and it wouldn't hit the road for 7 years. This was why infotainment systems lagged the state of the art for so long - they were apparently shipping components that would have belonged in a smartphone from more than half a decade before. In this case, I believe we had a few phones get A/B updates by Android 7, which was late 2016. Giving it a year or so to filter to more CPU chipsets, that would mean (if the old rule held true), we would expect to see A/B hitting new cars in the next year or two. This assumes auto makers are using enough of the Android BSP to get the bootloader with A/B (which isn't a given), and then that they use it! Anyone with any experience of auto software know if the teams doing software are experienced and understand the platform side of things, or if it's a traditional front-end heavy "crunch release" type affair? I've seen some pretty poor quality infotainment systems in the past, so my assumption is inexperienced devs with limited platforms knowledge, focused on "get it working to ship it", but would be interesting to hear from anyone with experience of how this really goes down.

justsomehnguy 3y ago

It was a great advantage, both in marketing and the real usage, when the motherboards started to support the Dual BIOS (GIGABYTE term, AFAIR). 2003 I think?