Adding Android capabilities in automotive Linux infotainment: available virtualization technologies

People use Android applications to perform everyday activities. That is why the most common In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) consumer requirement is the support for user-attractive Android applications. However, many Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) have developed their automotive IVI domain based on Linux OS. A few years ago, Google started to develop Android Automotive as an Android-based solution for the automotive IVI domain. Because of competition, the automotive industry is looking for different ways of adding support for Android applications. But having Android applications in an already present Linux is not an easy task considering the amount of effort put in establishing noticeable UI/UX features. This paper gives an overview of two software-based virtualization solutions for adding support for Android applications on an already running Linux IVI domain. The solutions are hypervisor technology, already used in production, and container technology, a relatively new approach in the automotive. Both solutions are deployed on the same automotive-grade platform to preserve the same test conditions. The memory consumption is evaluated between a specific hypervisor and container runtime solution. The paper concludes that it is better to use container technology to add Android support to systems where memory usage by several Android applications is not known in advance.