Eclipse S-CORE Verified

Friday, August 14, 2026 - 05:43 by Kateryna Krykunova
This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the community. Please login and add your feedback in the comments section.
Proposal State
Community Review
Background

Eclipse Safe Open Vehicle Core (Eclipse S-CORE) is an open-source middleware for software-defined vehicles, under the purview of the Eclipse SDV Working Group. It provides a modular stack (IPC, orchestration, etc.) and a development process aligned with automotive software standards like ISO 26262. S-CORE is intended as upstream open-source software, which distributors (e.g., Tier-1 suppliers, OS vendors) can adapt for specific hardware and OS configurations to create their own commercial or non-commercial offerings. 

Eclipse S-CORE is primarily designed and optimized for **High-Performance Computing Platforms (HCPs)** in automotive applications.

Initial usecase: ADAS

Link: https://eclipse.dev/score/ 

Eclipse S-CORE artefacts can be used as  upstream open-source software. The project itself does not ship turnkey production ready binaries. Instead, Eclipse S-CORE is a hardware agnostic, high level middleware platform that requires adaptation to a specific hardware and operating system configuration. The permissive license of Eclipse S-CORE (project is primarily licensed under the Apache Software License 2.0) allows for commercial and non commercial offerings by Eclipse S-CORE distributors, e.g.Tier-1 suppliers, operating systems vendors and specialised middleware firms. These S-CORE distributors may additionally obtain certification evidence for their commercial offering, and deliver it to companies under contractual liability.  

The Eclipse S-CORE Verified project aims to deliver an open, vendor-neutral, runnable verification test suite to increase confidence in a solution by testing whether distributions leveraging Eclipse S-CORE are indeed compatible with a certain version of the project.

Scope

Eclipse S-CORE Verified provides an open, versioned suite of reproducible tests to verify that candidate distributions based on Eclipse S-CORE conform to its APIs, runtime characteristics, component integration contracts, documented external interfaces, expected behavior, and quality standards.

The Eclipse S-CORE Verified project defines “distribution” as followed: A distribution is a commercial or non commercial software stack that leverages a certain Eclipse S-CORE version as a middleware building block. The scope of the Eclipse S-CORE verified  project is to:

  • Define, in collaboration with the Eclipse S-CORE project and the broader Eclipse S-CORE community and the X-CORE platform council, the verification criteria that a distribution full-fills to demonstrate it is genuinely based on Eclipse S-CORE upstream components.
  • Develop, maintain, and version an open verification test suite that exercises the public APIs, interfaces, runtime behaviour and integration points defined by Eclipse S-CORE.
  • Provide tooling and software infrastructure that allows any party — e.g. Eclipse S-CORE contributors, distributors, OEMs, independent integrators, academia — to run the test suite themselves against a candidate distribution and obtain reproducible, comparable results.
  • Define a transparent, open result-reporting format so that verification outcomes can be shared, archived, and compared across distributions and across different Eclipse S-CORE versions.
  • Maintain traceability between upstream Eclipse S-CORE source artefacts (Git commits, release tags, documentation) and the corresponding versioned test assets in this project, so that verification results are unambiguously tied to a specific upstream baseline.
  • Develop materials and documentation that make it straightforward for a distributor or downstream consumer to adopt the test suite and to understand the meaning — and limits — of a passing result.
  • Continuously evolve the test material in sync with new S-CORE releases, newly added components, and lessons learned from real-world execution.
  • The project reuses the same versioning schema and methodology of the Eclipse S-CORE project. With each Eclipse S-CORE version a corresponding version of this project shall be available. 

Out of Scope

To avoid confusion with related project types and existing Eclipse S-CORE governance, the following are explicitly out of scope:

  • Issuing legally binding compatibility certifications or operating a trademark licensing program. Authority over the "Eclipse S-CORE", "S-CORE Compatible" and "S-CORE Certified" marks rests with the Eclipse Foundation.
  • Determine the scope or roadmap of the Eclipse S-CORE project. This project consumes the Eclipse S-CORE specification and codebase as inputs; it does not define them.
  • Functional safety assessment for a specific downstream use is out of scope.
  • Eclipse Specification Project. This proposal explicitly scopes the project as a verification / test suite project. Should the S-CORE community decide in the future to pursue a formal Eclipse Specification Project with an associated Technology Compatibility Kit, the assets developed here may serve as input to such a future effort, but that transition is not part of this proposal.
Description

Eclipse S-CORE Verified is the verification project for Eclipse S-CORE.

It takes a candidate distribution that claims to be based on Eclipse S-CORE and exercises it against an open, versioned suite of tests that reflect the upstream S-CORE codebase: API behaviour, runtime characteristics, integration contracts between S-CORE components, and the documented external interfaces of the platform.

The goal is to verify that a distribution not only leverages Eclipse S-CORE version X, but also adheres to its expected behaviour and established quality standards, using reproducible technical evidence rather than relying on marketing claims alone.

By running and passing a prescribed and versioned set of tests from the Eclipse S-CORE Verified suite, a distribution can demonstrate that:

  • Its public APIs and interfaces correspond to the upstream Eclipse S-CORE baseline at a stated version.
  • Its runtime behaviour for the components covered by the suite is consistent with the upstream reference implementation.
  • The traceable identity between the upstream Eclipse S-CORE release and the components shipped in the distribution can be established and audited.

In addition to verifying that distributions are release-ready against the upstream baseline, the Eclipse S-CORE Verified tests may also serve to verify the quality of new functionality during S-CORE upstream development itself, providing a continuous quality signal back to the Eclipse S-CORE project.

The project will be operated as an open, community-driven asset under Eclipse Foundation governance, with public repositories, public meeting notes, and open contributor processes — consistent with Eclipse S-CORE's "Open by Choice. Safe by Design." principle.

Why Here?

Eclipse S-CORE is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation under the SDV Working Group. A verification project that exists to serve the S-CORE community must share that home in order to:

  • Inherit the same vendor-neutral governance model that protects S-CORE from capture by any single member company.
  • Operate under the same Eclipse Development Process and IP policy that S-CORE consumers already trust.
  • Maintain a clean, formal coupling — at the Foundation level — between the upstream S-CORE project and the verification assets that exercise it.
  • Allow the future S-CORE Compatibility Program to draw on these assets through Foundation-recognised processes.

Hosting this work outside Eclipse, or inside any single member company, would undermine exactly the neutrality that makes the verification result trustworthy.

Project Scheduling

Initial start is with S-CORE v1.0

Source Repository Type