MirrorLink

When a MirrorLink device is connected, MirrorLink apps are available to launch.

Overview

The QNX CAR platform supports the MirrorLink technology standard (version 1.1) to enable MirrorLink apps on a smartphone to work with the car's HMI.

This document covers the following topics:

Devices supported

Although any MirrorLink Certified server device (phone) should work, we have tested the following phones with the QNX CAR platform 2.1:
  • Samsung Galaxy S III (with DriveLink app)
  • Nokia 701 and E7 (with Nokia's Car Mode and MirrorLink app installed—note that the free non-MirrorLink version of Car Mode will not work.)

For the current list of MirrorLink Certified server devices, see the following page at the Car Connectivity Consortium (CCC) site (using the Servers search filter):

MirrorLink™ Certified Product Listing

Note: You need to have the appropriate MirrorLink app for the device installed. Once you plug in the phone, the MirrorLink apps should appear in the HMI's apps section (under ALL). On some phones you must unlock the phone and start the MirrorLink app manually before connecting the phone to the head unit.

Network sandbox

To access a device, MirrorLink services need the devnp-ncm.so driver to be loaded into an io-pkt network stack. You should use a separate network stack for MirrorLink—by convention, this stack should use the /mirrorlink_sandbox prefix.
Note: It's important to set an instance number for this network stack to prevent mount commands from loading drivers into this stack.
To use SLM to start the network sandbox, add this component section to the SLM configuration file: 
<SLM:component name="mirrorlink-sandbox">
     <SLM:command>io-pkt-v6-hc</SLM:command>
     <SLM:args> -i1 -d ncm pnp -ptcpip prefix=/mirrorlink_sandbox</SLM:args>
     <SLM:stop stop="signal">SIGTERM</SLM:stop>
     <SLM:waitfor wait="pathname">/mirrorlink_sandbox/dev/socket</SLM:waitfor>
     <SLM:depend>usb</SLM:depend>
     <SLM:depend>pps-setup</SLM:depend>
</SLM:component>

To debug the network sandbox, you can use ifconfig, dhcp.client, and other network utilities by setting the SOCK environment variable to the sandbox's prefix:

SOCK=/mirrorlink_sandbox/ ifconfig

PPS interface

The mlink-daemon service uses these PPS objects:
This PPS object: Contains:
/pps/services/mirrorlink/applications Information about the VNC-typed MirrorLink apps that are currently available.
/pps/services/mirrorlink/entities Information about the MirrorLink entities (devices) that are currently available.
/pps/services/mirrorlink/rtp RTP audio-streaming information for MirrorLink apps.
/pps/system/navigator/applications/applications The list of apps installed on the system.

Licensing

The three MirrorLink services use RealVNC licensing as follows:
mlink-daemon
Although this service doesn't need the license file for discovering devices, it uses the file for audio (the Audio SDK has an implicit dependency on the Viewer SDK, which requires the license file).
mlink-rtp
Doesn't need a license file.
mlink-viewer
This service uses the Viewer SDK; it cannot work at all without the license file.
The license file resides under /etc/vnclicense by default, but you can use the -L command-line option (to both mlink-daemon and mlink-viewer) to change this location.
Note: Although some features of these services will work without a license file, all of these services depend on the RealVNC SDKs and require proper licensing from RealVNC.