Proposal for graphics sharing in a mixed criticality automotive digital cockpit

In this paper, we present the concept of multilayer cross-platform graphics sharing in the automotive digital cockpit. Considering that automobiles today have around 150 ECUs (engine control units), managing all these ECUs is becoming a challenging task. For example, there is a controller (System on Chip - SoC) for every display in an automobile. This SoC is used for content rendering and data processing. The number of ECUs can be lowered by using SoCs with a hypervisor. A hypervisor is a concept that enables us to run two operating systems on one SoC in real-time. The content from both operating systems can be rendered and presented in the same display output. The proposed system consists of one SoC with two operating systems running on a hypervisor. With this proposed solution, we were able to simultaneously render content from both operating systems on one display output. The proposed solution also covers the rendering of media content on display that is hosted on a different operating system and therefore enables mixed criticality where safety-critical information, such as those presented in the cluster, are presented with no interference with the non-critical operations, such as media rendering. We also evaluate safety concerns and system performance when content is rendered simultaneously on both operating systems.