UniC: A Unified Automotive Cockpit Domain Management System for Enhanced In-vehicle Infotainment

Modern intelligent cockpits consolidate In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI), navigation, and control-related services on shared heterogeneous hardware. This consolidation creates a resource-management problem because cockpit workloads have different controllability, safety, and performance requirements. Existing open-source cockpit-domain platforms either fix the hardware partition at design time or route IVI through para-virtualized I/O stacks that impose large rendering overheads. As a result, performance-sensitive IVI workloads cannot effectively use onboard GPUs even when safety-critical workloads do not need those resources. We present UniC, a unified cockpit-domain resource management system based on attribute-aware task placement. UniC models each workload through controllability, safety demand, and performance demand, and maps workloads to four execution environments through a piecewise assignment policy. UniC does not replace the underlying safety stack; it preserves hypervisor- and IOMMU-enforced boundaries for safety-critical workloads while avoiding over-provisioned isolation for low-safety infotainment tasks. For IVI, UniC realizes this placement through GPU passthrough, display synthesis acceleration, cross-platform application support, and optional nearby-edge rendering for passenger devices. In our prototype, UniC reduces normalized IVI virtualization overhead from 38.7% to 11.8% compared with the reproduced open-source AMD/Xen baseline, a 26.9-percentage-point reduction. UniC maintains hypervisor-level performance isolation across execution environments. Under controlled network impairment, in-vehicle edge rendering keeps on-screen response latency substantially more stable than a cloud-based alternative.