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Comment by js2 | Hacker News Reader

I have a 2016 CX-9. It’s been years since I looked into this, but the Mazda infotainment system is running Linux. You used to be able to login to it over the USB port, but they locked that down at some point with a firmware upgrade so that you could only get to it over a serial connection that you could get to if you were comfortable removing the console.

The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based.

Ah, here you go:

https://mazdatweaks.com/

(I retrofitted CarPlay support to mine via an upgrade Mazda offered a couple years after I got the car and I think that closed off access to tweaking, but I forget. I’m generally happy with the UI but I wish it booted faster. It’s a good 1-2 minutes after starting the car before it’s responsive.)

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The UI is developed by a U.S. company and I think is JavaScript based

The IVI from that era is an iMX6 hardware platform developed by Johnson Controls and was written in JavaScript running on the Opera browser.

JCI sold that business to Visteon in 2014.

If you have a navigation SD card inserted (that you likely don’t use due to the CarPlay), try removing it. It sped up my boot times significantly. I also have a usb full of music that I plug in sometimes, and I notice it is slower to boot with that inserted as well.

Sounds like fsck running at boot time

Could be fsck or could be searching the whole drive for media files to index it every time it's inserted or the system rebooted. I guess a reasonable test of which without better access to the thing would be to have two drives of the same size with one mostly full and one mostly empty.

I drive a 2016 CX-5 with the stock in-dash software. If I'm bored enough at some point I might test the hypothesis on that.

I also drive a 2016 Mazda, and I can confirm that I had the same problem with the same fix

Thanks for this idea. Made a big difference.

My 3 is a 2015. Got it used in 2017 and after a few months, I loaded Android Auto on it using Mazda AIO Tweaks.

Notably, the UI was sluggish and unstable before (and after) I installed Android Auto.

With Android Auto installed, I got a good two and a half years out of moderately reliable use, but just as the pandemic started in March 2020, Android Auto got remarkably unstable. It might run OK for a few songs if I only did one thing, i.e. Pandora OR Google Maps, but doing both almost always caused a freeze within seconds, required the three button salute to reboot the system.

I thought it might be due to the phone (Pixel 3), but I tried a different phone since with the same result (OnePlus 7 Pro). I suspect something changed on the Android side, but Android 9 was six months earlier and Android 10 was six months later. The updated Android Auto design had been out for several months (summer 2019) before I started having issues. Since I haven't driven much since the pandemic started, I still haven't tried to fix it. (I suspect maybe an updated install from Mazda AIO Tweaks might help.)

I did the same. Wouldn't want to miss it on my 2018 model.

Edit: By the way. Thanks for reminding me. I looked at the site and they now have support for wireless Android Auto. So I might just be able to ditch the somewhat unreliable connection with the cable.

I got to meet with some guys who worked on that system at my last job. At the time, they were called OpenCar, and the system was recognizable as what ended up in the Mazda. I do recall that in spite of the name, nothing they were doing was open source.

IIRC Tesla's touchscreen UI is running React Native?

Tesla uses Qt.

Ford is using an HTML-based interface in the Mach-E (and vehicles which get infotainment systems derived from that new generation of infotainment system). I've seen rumors that Ford is using React to power that interface, but I wasn't able to pin down any real sources.

This explains to some degree how Tesla is able to have such a buttery smooth UI on such terrible Intel Atom hardware (until recently.. they're switching to much better hardware now). At the same time, the Mach-E interface is not very smooth at all, but it is functionally pretty good. I think Ford should have a leg up on rapidly improving their infotainment interface, given that I would expect React to make some things easier than Qt... but Ford has so far failed to demonstrate that they can effectively distribute OTA updates, regardless of early promises. Hopefully they get that figured out soon.

"Buttery smooth" with complicated React UIs is entirely possible if you design it right. Unfortunately too many people just assume that whatever they throw at it will be fine.

Yes, but... it is difficult to do that on underpowered hardware. Modern browser engines seem to take a lot of resources to do anything at all, which gives you even less headroom before you write a single line of code. I don't think the Mach-E is equipped with a very powerful chip for the infotainment system. Since I can't find any reference to what it is, I would assume it's nothing to be proud of -- some kind of really old ARM chip, maybe.

If they equipped the Mach-E with a reasonably powerful SoC for the infotainment system, then I would agree 100% that a React-based UI could be implemented in such a way that it operates smoothly.

I've written fairly complicated React SPA UIs (certainly much more complicated than anything I've seen a car infotainment system other than, say, map rendering specifically) than run fine on relatively ancient phones and Chromebooks, so I think you're excusing just plain bad design a little too much here. I have to think they'd have the same issues regardless of platform, or if not only from using something that takes away control of the kind of things that can cause lag issues in React.

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