Building an Automotive Embedded Linux Image for Edge and Cloud Using Arm-based Graviton Instances, Yocto Project, and SOAFEE

Embedded software developers in the automotive industry have used a traditional embedded development methodology that has been largely unchanged for decades. The embedded target system that the software is being written for is by nature resource constrained with limited memory, compute, and input/output capacity. Additionally, embedded development systems are often expensive and a scarce commodity for development teams working on brand new electronic control units (ECUs) and system-on-chip (SoC) architectures. This scarcity has become further apparent with the recent global chip shortages in the automotive industry.

This means software developers avoid developing software directly on the embedded platform itself and instead rely on developing software on a powerful development machine or host. Compilers and toolchains used to create executable software for development and testing on the host machine cannot be used directly for deployment on the embedded target. Many times, the target-embedded operating system (OS) itself cannot be used on the host machine. Developers rely on cumbersome OS emulation tools on their host machine and the process of cross-compiling, which uses a special compiler to create executable code for the target system.

This session will introduce a building block toward a novel automotive-software development concept that helps developers create, test, and debug natively compiled software using the cloud, greatly simplifying this workflow. This concept is often referred to as environmental parity. It will describe how to create a custom Linux AMI that can be used to launch an Amazon EC2 instance.

Content is based on blog post and companion code: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/building-an-automotive-embedded-linux-image-for-edge-using-arm-graviton-yocto-project-soafee/