Open Source Summit North America 2025

Modern Heterogeneous SoCs designed for automotive use cases integrate multiple remote processors (rprocs) for Real-Time Operations, like Cortex-R5F for handling Capture and Display, alongside a general-purpose processor like Cortex-A to run HLOS like Linux. Automotive requirements are Time-Critical, Safety-Oriented and often demand for the Real-Time rprocs to be booted early for use cases like Early Chime, Early Rear View Camera (RVC). This presentation discusses about the “Early Boot + Late Attach” feature in remoteproc framework, where-in the rprocs would be brought up early in the boot flow by bootloader, and later Linux would just “attach” into the pre-running rprocs to establish IPC & suspend/resume. It also explains how developers can adopt this approach and shares debugging lessons. The talk also addresses how the framework handles key challenges with this approach, like identifying a pre-running rproc and allocating the resources required by it (memory carveouts, mappings, trace buffers etc.) by parsing the pre-loaded firmware, rather than re-initializing the core like in normal boot flow. A live case study will be presented on Early RVC application showcasing this feature.