The automotive industry is undergoing a major technological shift and Jaguar Land Rover is at the forefront.
The UK-based JLR has embraced Linux as the operating system underlying its next generation In-Vehicle
Infotainment (IVI) systems. The company has also taken a leadership role in advocating for open source
development within the automotive industry.
We talked briefly via email with Matt Jones, a Senior Technical Specialist for infotainment systems at
Jaguar Land Rover and the Vice President of the non-profit GENIVI
Alliance, an automotive industry effort to drive adoption of an IVI open-source development
platform. In his keynote at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit in San
Francisco, April 15-17, Matt will share Jaguar Land Rover’s experience moving to Linux-based IVI and the
future of the technology.
How is Jaguar Land Rover involved with Linux? Jaguar Land Rover uses Linux in a range of systems; but importantly has a GENIVI-compliant, Linux-based infotainment
system in development.
The most important aspects of a Linux based IVI system are that it meets all of the expectations of the customer.
This includes all of the power management, data storage and persistence, start-up timing and other automotive
requirements. At this time these are implemented by each provider, or covered by the GENIVI stack, and are not yet
in a truly open Linux distribution.
The challenges are still being discovered. It’s critical that the community works together to find appropriate
solutions for automotive. There are different communities working together with similar objectives. The challenge is
to unite and run in a single direction, in the open source.
significantly different IVI future.
Matt Jones is the Technical Lead for the next generation of infotainment systems at Jaguar Land Rover and
the Vice President of the GENIVI Alliance; leading the push for open infotainment standards and leading edge
features being deployed rapidly to the customer.
Matt began his career in professional audio, before joining the automotive sector with Jaguar Land Rover
in 2002. He led the deployment of rear seat entertainment and television across the range of vehicles, and
was responsible for the relationship and launches of premium audio systems with Bowers & Wilkins and
most recently Meridian Audio. Following on he has taken the lead in many areas of Infotainment strategy,
managing the System Architecture teams and off-shore development centres. Outside of Jaguar Land Rover, Matt
is a Chartered Electrical and Mechanical Engineer, being a member of both the IMechE and the IET.
can be found on The Linux
Foundation Collaboration Summit website. If you’re not already attending, you can still request an
invitation.