The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project is about to unleash the second version of its unified code base - snappily called UCB 2.0 - with expanded hardware support.

For the participating car-makers and hardware vendors it's a big deal.

Features landing in the latest distribution include support for a rear seat display with video playback, letting a rear-seat passenger control video from their touch screen; audio routing supporting both GENIVI (“IVI” stands for in-vehicle infotainment) and Samsung's Tizen. There's also a new build environment and a new test infrastructure.

What will be exciting the project most, we suspect, is that this version supports a lot more hardware than AGL supported in January 2016.

Back then, there were two Renesas boards and a QEMU x86 virtual machine with AGL; now, the distribution supports hardware from NXP, Qualcomm's DragonBoard, TI's Vayu EVM, the Raspberry Pi, and various Intel boards.

The project reckons its vehicle messaging bus will block car hackers, by preventing rogue applications from talking to the vehicle bus; and the application framework similarly has an eye to security, with resources assigned only to approved applications.

The distribution will get its download button during the Automotive Grade Linux Summit in Tokyo this week. ®