Former Tesla Firmware Engineer Discusses the System

Post by emidln » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 8:41 PM UTC

bradleybuda wrote: post #49

At DEF CON 23 there were two car-hacking talks that made an impression on me: one about hacking a Tesla [1] and one about hacking a Jeep [2]. FWIW, I came away thinking that the software architecture of the Tesla was light-years ahead of what Jeep (and presumably many other legacy manufacturers) was shipping: [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX_0c9R4Fng [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OobLb1McxnI

Post by samstave » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

mlaretallack wrote: post #99

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a person who used to write navigation and control software for autonomous vehicles who occasionally gets downvoted for telling people that you really don't need a fancy RTOS for this stuff, you really don't need a fancy RTOS for this stuff. Linux is a very common platform for highly responsive robotic systems. I promise that their pid control isn't an Electron app.

Agree completely. Hard real time is possible with Linux, we use it for sub millisecond control of Traffic Lights. The only issue we ever hit is proving that the code running is the stuff we expected to run.

Post by ASalazarMX » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 8:46 PM UTC

gerardnll wrote: post #224

ryandrake wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard the same thing about the burnout and turnover. Do companies really think they are saving money by paying peanuts, grinding people down to burnout, and then constantly having to rehire/retrain new people as the old ones leave? Meanwhile the code is a mess because nobody has been there longer than a year and there is no architecture or design continuity. Just frantic patches over other frantic patches by burnt…

Capitalism. Need for money and results. I don't think that anybody wants to burnout anybody, it's just the pressure of the whole system I guess. Money pushes to do things fast. Shareholders and clients to keep happy.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 8:46 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #148

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why Linux instead of an RTOS? Same reason SpaceX eschews radiation-hardened processors for redundant off-the-shelf cores: supplier competition. There aren't many RTOS engineers on the market; there are many Linux engineers. Once they got over the cost of hardening the kernel, SpaceX found itself at a scaling advantage versus RTOS-based competitors.

> Same reason SpaceX eschews radiation-hardened processors for redundant off-the-shelf cores A devil-may-care throw-caution-to-the-wind cavalier attitude? > supplier competition I stand corrected. And I'm never buying a Tesla or property even remotely close to SpaceX launch sites...

Post by eeZah7Ux » Fri, Aug 24, 2018, 8:48 PM UTC

blub wrote: post #173

shittyadmin wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just that but holy shit some of those commercial RTOSes have major issues. I work in aerospace and we recently used one where the whole system would crash after ~230 days of uptime. At least with Linux you're getting a system that's been used so much that all major issues like that are ironed out. Nothing beats a few million testers.

Ubuntu Linux has millions of testers, your custom version has only been tested by you and your customers :)