The big edge computing news from Red Hat Summit is the first continuously certified Linux OS for vehicles.
Linux is a great operating system for devices. It’s cheap, customizable, and secure. But it has its challenges. For manufacturing companies and other firms deploying thousands of devices, management can be a hassle. And if your device is a car, it can be difficult keeping the software certified for use even though the software is continually changing.
Red Hat made two big announcements today at its Red Hat Summit in Boston to address these problems.
The Red Hat Edge Manager, now in technology preview, will address key points of edge deployment for enterprises, such as the fact that edge deployments tend to run on many different types of hardware.
“What we’re aiming at is to ease the operations of managing edge devices,” said Francis Chow, Red Hat vice president and general manager for In-Vehicle Operating System and edge, at a press conference. “We want to make it easy for onboarding, configurating, updating, troubleshooting and monitoring edge devices.”
According to Chow, the Edge Manager will be able to support up to 10,000 devices with a single pane of glass. “And also we have a policy based approach to enforce compliance of those deployments, both at the application level as well as the infrastructure level.”
These could be anything from thousands of dispersed retail point-of-sale systems or industrial machinery on remote factory floors.
Another problem for enterprises deploying edge devices is that there’s usually a lack of IT expertise in these locations, Chow says.
The Red Hat Edge Manager will address that skills gap with a user-friendly, simplified management environment, the company announced. The tool also supports onboarding, updates and decommissioning and is optimized for container-centric workflows on Podman, Docker, and Kubernetes.
But while the Edge Manager might have wide application for many enterprises, it’s Red Hat’s release of a Linux operating system for cars that is getting attention.
The Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System, scheduled for full release in the third quarter of this year, has achieved a significant certification as a Safety Element out-of-Context under the ISO 26262 Edition 2, 2018- Level ASIL-B standard. This means that companies won’t have to obtain a costly and time-consuming re-certification each time the software changes.
This is a major breakthrough.
The in-vehicle operating system launch is the most significant piece of edge computing news from Red Hat this week, says IDC analyst Jim Mercer. “It is being touted as the first Linux product for functional safety in automotive applications,” he says.
There have been a lot of attempts to certify Linux in vehicles, says Chow. “All of the efforts of trying to certify Linux have failed in the last decade.”
Red Hat says that its new vehicle operating system can support advanced driver-assistance systems, digital cockpits, telematics, infotainment, and cutting-edge AI models. There’s also an industry ecosystem starting to form around the new operating system, with Arm, Intel, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, LG Electronics, and other hardware and software partners.
And one car company has already come out in support. Nissan announced that it will use the Red Hat In-Vehicle Operating System to power its next-generation software-defined vehicle platform.
“This collaboration will help propel Nissan’s transformation into a software-defined vehicle leader, positioning the company in the evolving mobility landscape,” Kazuma Sugimoto, Nissan’s general manager of the software engineering department in the software defined vehicle engineering division, said in a statement.
