Say Hi! to the new GENIVI Development Platform

On Wednesday February 17th, the GENIVI Alliance released a QEMU image of the GENIVI Demo Platform ivi9 Beta version, together with everything needed (instructions, source code, recepies, etc.) to build GDP-ivi9 with Yocto. A few weeks later, on March 8th, the first release candidate was published.

Finally, last April 19th GDP-ivi9 was published targeting QEMU, Renesas Porter and RPi2. Check the release announcement and download the different images and source code from the GDP download page.

I joined the GDP project in November 2015, leading a small team of developers from Codethink with the idea of moving GDP from a demo platform towards a collaboration platform. In summary, going from +r-- to +rwx. 

What was GDP?

GENIVI Demo Platform was the compilation of middleware components developed by GENIVI integrated with Yocto or Baserock, based on poky, designed to showcase and test the work done by GENIVI's Expert Groups.

What is GENIVI Development Platform?

At GENIVI's 14th All Members Meeting (AMM) is was announced that GDP would change his name, from Demo Platform to Development Platform, reflecting the new spirit that has arisen during the delivery of the  GDP-ivi9 version.

The general idea will be to mature those GENIVI's modules that were developed as proof of concepts (PoC) and provide up to date software together with a SDK, to attract developers to participate as contributors, having GDP as their number one Open Source platform for automotive.

Find further information about GENIVI Development Platform at GENIVI's public wiki, in the GDP project pages. The name change, recently announced will be reflected in the wiki in the coming weeks. 

Coming actions

During the coming weeks, the GDP delivery team will focus on the following topics:

• Migration from the current infrastructure to Github.
• Confluence will remain as the project wiki and JIRA as the ticketing system. The same applies for the rest of GENIVI.
• Add to our current targets another board: Intel Minnowboard
• Define together with the GDP community the roadmap for the next GDP version.
• Create a first alpha of the new version including the latest GENIVI software.

Feel free to propose enhancements or new features to GDP. The only thing you have to do is create a subtask under the ticket GDP-154, describe it and explain the benefits and potential risks/challenges. We will discuss them through the mailing list. I am looking forward of seeing Plasma 5 as part of GDP.

GENIVI 14th AMM and other events to promote GDP.

After te release of the new version, GDP maintainers and myself have been concentrated in making sure GDP was ready for  GENIVI's 14th All Members Meeting (AMM), that took place in Paris from April 25th to 29th.

I participated as speaker in 3 sessions and my colleagues at Codethink delivered a couple of Hands on Sessions about GDE-ivi9. It has been a lot of work but a good finish line for this release cycle. We will publish the slides the coming days.

A few weeks earlier I presented the GDP project at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC), that took place in San Diego from April 4th to 6th. It was my first time at this conference and I enjoyed it. I also participated at the Collaboration Summit, invited by AGL and the Linux Foundation. I will provide some more details about these events in a later post.

I plan to attend to QtCon to promote GDP among Qt/KDE developers and to the Automotive Linux Summit, that will take place in Japan, to spread the word about this open project for automotive. I have also confirmed my presence in June 2nd at the OpenExpo, in Madrid. It will be my first event in Spain in quite some time.

Summary

It has been a very busy 6 months but very productive. Leading a small but promising Open Source project, that might have a big influence within automotive in the future, working together with my colleagues at Codethink and GDP community members, has been very interesting. I am learning a lot about this industry...by doing.