Proposal for visual warnings system in the automotive digital cockpit using graphics sharing

In this paper is presented the concept of using shared graphics to display visual warnings in the automotive digital cockpit. Given that cars today have over 100 ECUs (ECU - control unit), communication and management of all these ECUs become a challenging task. This paper focuses on the control units used to display the content and process the data of each screen in the car. The number of control units for data processing and display of content can be reduced by using SoC (SoC - System on a chip) with a hypervisor. A hypervisor is a concept that allows us to run two operating systems on one SoC in real-time. The proposed system consists of one SoC with two operating systems running on a hypervisor and having the ability to display content on three different screens. The proposed solution covers the simultaneous display of content from both operating systems on one screen as well as the display of visual warnings on all screens in the digital cockpit, regardless of the operating system that hosts that screen. Alerts are displayed from a higher security operating system regardless of the content currently displayed from a lower security operating system. This approach has led to the certification of operating systems in terms of security.