this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
1855 points (97.4% liked)
Mildly Infuriating
35578 readers
826 users here now
Home to all things "Mildly Infuriating" Not infuriating, not enraging. Mildly Infuriating. All posts should reflect that.
I want my day mildly ruined, not completely ruined. Please remember to refrain from reposting old content. If you post a post from reddit it is good practice to include a link and credit the OP. I'm not about stealing content!
It's just good to get something in this website for casual viewing whilst refreshing original content is added overtime.
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means: -No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
7. Content should match the theme of this community.
-Content should be Mildly infuriating.
-At this time we permit content that is infuriating until an infuriating community is made available.
...
8. Reposting of Reddit content is permitted, try to credit the OC.
-Please consider crediting the OC when reposting content. A name of the user or a link to the original post is sufficient.
...
...
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
Reach out to LillianVS for inclusion on the sidebar.
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To ensure that the update process finishes without interruption due to weak battery - if that happens it can brick your car. Tbf you can also just connect the battery to a power source and keep the engine off. Depending on update and car updates that take a few hours are not unheard of
This is such extremely poor engineering that it throws me into a rage. There is nothing to prevent them from installing the update in the background progressively while driving and then just switching to the new version in one swift atomic operation (like changing the name of a directory) when it's ready
There's two major things limiting them actually. Bad software developers and using the barest possible minimum on processors and RAM to run the systems.
I wonder if cut backs on the processing power had any relation to the chip supply chain issues over the past year or two?
Probably has more to do with the extreme penny pinching most auto manufacturers do
We both know that this will never happen. For the same reason why you can get a 300k$ car, and have an infotainment system that runs at 3fps. They don't have any incentive to make it run better
That's additional work. Easier to tell people to run the engines.
Backup cameras are mandatory by federal law. If your device is updating when you put the car in reverse then that wouldn't be allowed.
It won't be, if it's done right.
It's a mix of piece coat optimization and a lot of creep in what used to be a pretty lightweight process throwing it into the ditch.
The things that run software in cars largely fall into one of two camps: MCUs and SOCs. Think Arduinos and Raspberry PIs. Background programming, with an active and inactive partition, is absolutely possible on a SOC. They're even file based, so you can do all kinds of clever things. Cars tend to not have many SOCs, so it's not a monumental task to pitch having them each coat a little bit more for extra storage/processing. The biggest hurdles here are automotive grade and the very long development cycles. These both mean that the hardware is 3+ years old when it launches.
MCUs tend to have monolithic software builds (think literally everything gets compiled into a single .exe). There are a million billion of these things in a typical vehicle from most automotive OEMs. It's... very hard to make them all have more capacity because you would take that cost and multiply it by 40 or so to get all the MCUs on a vehicle 'upgraded' for extra capacity.
If this all sounds a little crazy, it is. From two angles. First: do we really need as much software control in cars as we do? Marketing departments seem to think so. Second: the reason why there are so many small compute units in a car is the slow migration from mechanically controlled components to electrically controlled on. Back in the 80s the majory of automatic transmissions shifted based on a very complex mechanical system (look up a transmission valve body if you're curious). Moving that to electronic control meant adding a computer to control that functional. Now take this and multiply it and you'll kind of see the wreck in motion. Most OEMs are moving toward more centralized compute (fewer, larger, and smarter control units), but new electrical architectures take a lot of time/effort so it's slow going.
I'm pretty sure that what's being updated here is just the software for the infotainment display, which is likely a pretty powerful SOC that has nothing to do with any components that are necessary for driving the car.
Most OEMs usually show an update screen on their radio, even if something unrelated is being updated.
If the update is taking a long time it could be a really big file on a SOC. It could also be a smaller file being written to... very slow internal memory because when the part was sourced 8 years ago no one considered including memory read/write speed in the sourcing documentation. I'm betting the second, unless this OEM didn't include background programming on SOCs, which is kind of foolish given how much easier it is on a SOC than MCU.
I can't speak for this particular OEM, but 12 volt lead acid batteries don't have very deep power reserves. The OEM choosing to leave the battery on during programming is likely a method of ensuring there's enough juice to install the update and start the car on the next attempt.
a few hours!?