[jacquesm]

And what makes you think that the current crop of automotive software written in either asm or unsafe C is going to be any better than what you or I would produce? I've had a very recent model Mercedes C-class nearly kill me twice on account of buggy software. So much for that 'stellar' (pun intended) reputation. My current car is as dumb as it possibly could be.

I'd expect that if any ECU software was to be released that we'd finally realize how bad things really are and that there would be a massive amount of work done on making sure these pieces of critical software would be as safe as they could possibly be.

Note that the norm is 'a subset of C deemed to be safe' but that what I've seen of such development would not pass my personal threshold for quality work. In fact, rather the opposite. On the plus side, the hardware people usually know their stuff and realize what is dangerous to pass to the software people so with some luck your vehicle will use an FPGA for any kind of really safety critical stuff (or processors embedded with the relevant hardware, such as ABS and so on).

[formerly_proven]

> I'd expect that if any ECU software was to be released that we'd finally realize how bad things really are and that there would be a massive amount of work done on making sure these pieces of critical software would be as safe as they could possibly be.

toyota/denso michael barr testimony cough

edit: oh, there's even slides now, you don't even have to read the court transcript https://www.safetyresearch.net/Library/BarrSlides_FINAL_SCRU...

[jacquesm]

Yes, that's one of the better known cases. But I've looked at similar stuff under NDA and I'm more than a little bit uncomfortable with some of the stuff that I've seen.

The scariest kind of developer to me are the ones that believe that they and only they are able to create safe software without outside scrutiny of what they produce.

Of course that scrutiny would have exposed emissions cheating software right on day #1.

[intern4tional]

This comment chain appears to have a fundamental misconception of what constitutes safe and what does not.

Automotive standards and automotive coding standards approach safety in a different way than most people think (and given your comments I would say this includes you). If you're curious, you can have a look at some rules to evaluate automotive code that are published here: https://github.com/github/codeql-coding-standards

In short, the rules do not aim to eliminate failure or crashes, but rather make the crash predictable and uniform when a crash occurs so that it can be dealt with. This is further complicated by where and how the automotive manufacture chooses to implement safety controls. It is entirely possible to have a bunch of unsafe code running somewhere on a car, and simply have a small safety shim around said code that prevents the unsafe code from impacting the safe operation of the vehicle.

With that in mind, let's take the example that you use here of emissions cheating software. Emissions is likely not considered safety relevant (it might not even be QM, it just might be some code) and so no safety requirement applies to it. So, no real scrutiny would happen there regardless, at least from a safety perspective. See, validating that software passes a particular safety certification is time and money intensive and manufacturers therefore keep the amount of code that they qualify as safe to a minimum. This means as an example that the infotainment systems of many manufacturers are not safety relevant and no safety function should exist on or interact with them.

A few other things to consider from other threads:

- Telsa doesn't necessarily follow or adhere to safety standards. They (Telsa) are explicitly non-compliant in some cases, and this is partially why there are investigations into their practices.

- Industrial robotics code is just as bad if not worse than most automotive software from what I've seen. As you note, its that these robots are not under manual control

- None of this prevents the software from being open source. There are plenty of safety qualified open source projects. This simply limits who can contribute and how contributions are managed. The main reason why many things in automotive are not open source is that the ECU manufacturer isn't interested in doing so, and the Tier 1/2/3 that does the implementation is even less so.

[jacquesm]

There is a difference between what I with my layman-user cap on would consider unsafe (say, releasing purposefully harmful software into the environment or software with bugs like phantom braking) and what I with my embedded software programmer cap on (machine control, aerospace related) would consider to be unsafe. I spend a lot of my time reading root cause analysis on software failures and my only conclusion is that this is a very immature industry with a lot of players that should probably not be trusted as much as we do.

As for safety shims: for instance, watchdog timers are often used for this purpose, to bring a system that is exhibiting buggy behavior to behave more predictable. Personally I would consider any watchdog error that was not directly related to a hardware fault (say a bitflip) as a failure and I'd like to have my car report such failures.

Tesla being non-compliant is precisely my point: they get away with that because they don't have to open up their code to scrutiny. But I'll bet that if they would that their marketing department would not be able to spin stuff the way they do at present.

All of those would take into account the relevant context and I think that's where things go off the rails here: embedded software developers do not get to claim the high ground around what they consider safe or unsafe given the code from that world that I've had my eyes on. If anything it is amazing that it works as well as it does, the only two industries that get a pass based on my experience so far is medical embedded and avionics. Everybody else has the exact same problems as any other software project and would benefit from opening themselves up to scrutiny.

[intern4tional]

> Tesla being non-compliant is precisely my point: they get away with that because they don't have to open up their code to scrutiny.

This is an inaccurate assumption. ASIL compliance is something that you can publicly state, and Tesla explicitly does not. Most automotive products that do follow such standards generally state such. (Example: https://www.aubass.com/products/cp_top.html - search for ASIL D)

Making something open source does not in any way make it safe, unless your enforcement plan is having lawyers look into it and in which case you end up with lawsuits and likely endless litigation that results in a closed platform again. Tesla's calculation is that no one will enforce safety controls or standards compliance on them, and to be fair to date they (Tesla) are right.

> Personally I would consider any watchdog error that was not directly related to a hardware fault (say a bitflip) as a failure and I'd like to have my car report such failures.

This is an opinion and does not properly account for the multitude of scenarios that must be dealt with in automotive. Automotive, unlike aerospace, rarely has failover hardware or in some cases even A/B partitions on the disk for failover in software. Add in the need to process signals in real time and you will encounter situations where use of a health check (watchdog timer) is an appropriate response, and the use of one should not need to be reported.

> embedded software developers do not get to claim the high ground around what they consider safe or unsafe given the code from that world that I've had my eyes on.

They (embedded software developers) don't make such claims; when something is safety certified, an external third party does the validation and verification and asserts that an implementation and processes are either safe or not. In the EU this is usually done by TUV (https://www.tuv.com/world/en/) or Horiba-Mira (https://www.horiba-mira.com/).

This gets extremely complex as this is often hard tied to the hardware (support for a safety island, how memory is managed on the SOC, etc) and the overall E/E architecture (selected messaging protocol for the backbone) and layout of the vehicle. Analyzing a system of systems to determine all the possible impacts and make sure that the chance of failure is small enough to be acceptable is a hard problem to solve and not one any single engineer does.

[jacquesm]

>> Tesla being non-compliant is precisely my point: they get away with that because they don't have to open up their code to scrutiny.

> This is an inaccurate assumption. ASIL compliance is something that you can publicly state, and Tesla explicitly does not.

Sorry, but voluntary standards aren't standards, Tesla is incompliant with ASIL, if they were they'd definitely state that they are so you may as well assume that they're not. Personally I think any party that doesn't bother to state they are compliant should simply not be allowed to ship a vehicle because consumers are not going to be aware of the differences.

> Making something open source does not in any way make it safe, unless your enforcement plan is having lawyers look into it and in which case you end up with lawsuits and likely endless litigation that results in a closed platform again.

It does not guarantee safety. But it does more or less rest on the assumption that over the years at least some safety related bugs would be found and if there is anything that we've learned from open source over the last couple of decades then it is that if you look long and hard enough at even the most battle tested codebases that you will just uncover an ever lasting stream of bugs with the frequency reducing over time.

>> Personally I would consider any watchdog error that was not directly related to a hardware fault (say a bitflip) as a failure and I'd like to have my car report such failures.

> This is an opinion and does not properly account for the multitude of scenarios that must be dealt with in automotive.

Yes, it is my opinion as a software developer of many decades that if you rely on your watchdog timer to keep stuff running besides exceptional cases that you are doing it wrong. Imagine driving on the highway with one of your mirrors wedged against the guardrail for a close analogy of how I see this kind of 'engineering' practice.

A watchdog timer is the equivalent of ctrl-alt-del in case something stops working and while it is better than nothing and should definitely be present because it is still preferable from a system that is no longer responding at all (which is certainly going to be a safety issue) it should not be relied on for normal operation.

> Automotive, unlike aerospace, rarely has failover hardware or in some cases even A/B partitions on the disk for failover in software.

That's a cost decision, and with the cost of computation these days it is also absolute nonsense. A case could be made for this in the 80's but with hardware costing pennies this is simply no longer a valid excuse.

> Add in the need to process signals in real time and you will encounter situations where use of a health check (watchdog timer) is an appropriate response, and the use of one should not need to be reported.

I've been writing real time applications for a very long time and I highly doubt that such situations occur regularly but I'm open to having my mind changed, can you please explain exactly what kind of situation you have in mind where you think a watchdog timer expiring is an appropriate response?

For me a watchdog timer spells: the situation is such that we can no longer reliably function the safer option is to start all over again from a known set of defaults. It says that something unexpected has occurred that causes an operation that should have completed not to be completed and that this is outside of the design parameters that the software was originally specified with indicating that most likely the controller itself is at fault (and not the peripherals that it is attached to).

>> embedded software developers do not get to claim the high ground around what they consider safe or unsafe given the code from that world that I've had my eyes on.

> They (embedded software developers) don't make such claims; when something is safety certified, an external third party does the validation and verification and asserts that an implementation and processes are either safe or not.

Yes. And that process is anything but perfect. I've seen plenty of code that had passed certification that was so buggy it wasn't even funny. Including automotive. In an extreme cases someone thought it perfectly ok to do an OTA update on a vehicle in motion. I kid you not.

So let's not pretend certification is bullet proof even if it is useful it can miss glaringly obvious errors (time pressure, checkbox mentality).

> In the EU this is usually done by TUV (https://www.tuv.com/world/en/) or Horiba-Mira (https://www.horiba-mira.com/).

My experience is limited to the former. Let me recap that: I think their intentions are good but the bulk of the testing is limited to black box rather than in depth review and formal guarantees around performance. This has some interesting effects: it concentrates on the external manifestations of whatever makes the box tick and as long as the test parameters are exhaustive this will work very well. But for any device complex enough that the test parameters are only going to cover a fraction of the total parameter space you may end up with false confidence.

> This gets extremely complex as this is often hard tied to the hardware (support for a safety island, how memory is managed on the SOC, etc) and the overall E/E architecture (selected messaging protocol for the backbone) and layout of the vehicle.

Yes, again, I'm familiar with this and have some (but not complete) insight in how TUV operates when it comes to vehicle and component certification.

> Analyzing a system of systems to determine all the possible impacts and make sure that the chance of failure is small enough to be acceptable is a hard problem to solve and not one any single engineer does.

I think this is fundamentally borked. It will always be time and budget limited. Case in point: I recently reviewed some vehicle related stuff that had already been TUV certified that contained a glaring error in a complex control system, just looking at it from the outside gave me a fair idea of what I had to do to trip it up and sure enough it failed. TUV should have caught that (and the manufacturer too) if they were as safety conscious as they claim to be. I'm not saying that I'm outperforming TUV on a regular basis, I'm just saying that opening up this kind of code to more eyes, especially those that are more creative when it comes to breaking stuff, can - in my opinion - only be beneficial.

Edit: some more thinking about this: I think one of the reasons why I'm quite skeptical about for instance TUV is that in most countries that have large car manufacturers those manufacturers are 'too big to fail' and I would not be surprised at all if TUF (like BaFin) is not in a position strong enough to fail let's say a product line of a major manufacturer even if they find a massive error. It would immediately become a political football and in practice this gives manufacturers a lot of benefit of the doubt with respect to self regulation, besides the fact that such oversight entities are usually understaffed. TUV may well be with the best of intentions but the fact is that VW managed to bamboozle them in a way that any serious code audit including reproducible builds and something to verify that that was indeed what was shipped to customers should have caught.

But I don't see a massive undertaking to put all VW (and other manufacturers') code through the wringer beyond what was already uncovered simply because the only effect that uncovering such a scandal would would be to discredit the German car industry even further. So I don't think anybody is looking too hard.

[mikrotikker]

I got a friend who was almost killed by traction control. Pulling out of his driveway onto a 3 lane road, and having 2 cars 1 overtaking come around the corner very fast. He tried to punch it to get out of the way but: ”computer says no”. Longest 2 seconds of his life he reckons, waiting for the gas pedal to work again. Both cars had to brake very heavily.

"Safety"

[jacquesm]

Yes. That sort of thing. I had a 2015 model C-class Mercedes make two fairly serious attempts at killing me before I got rid of it. The first time it could have been a glitch, the second was so obviously borked that I still wonder why they released that stuff on the road. And no way to disable that 'feature'. I'd have loved to analyze what exactly went wrong there and why a bridge and an advertisement by the side of the road were classified as imminent frontal collision.

My present car just does what I tell it to, no gizmos. It may be statistically less safe (I'm willing to believe that) but at least it doesn't actively try to kill me in the name of keeping me safe.