BSP Design for SDVs: Hypervisor and Virtualization Challenges in Decoupling

Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) requires multiple domains—such as infotainment, instrument clusters, real-time ADAS functions, and AI features —to coexist safely on a single hardware platform. Achieving this requires strong isolation, making virtualization essential. A traditional software coupled with hardware loses software portability. Hardware decoupling is a crucial aspect in the SDV era.　While multiple approaches exist, this talk focuses on hypervisors, with Xen emerging as a key technology for isolation and hardware decoupling. However, automotive hypervisors have traditionally relied on commercial solutions, and applying an open-source hypervisor like Xen introduces challenges—especially on ARM platforms. These include BSP dependencies, complex boot flows, Device Tree configuration, memory constraints, and virtio-based device design. In this talk, we present a real-world hardware implementation combining Xen, Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), and Zephyr RTOS on ARM. We share practical integration issues and solutions, and demonstrate how virtio enables device abstraction and hardware decoupling.