topic Re: Mixing Autosar and non-autosar drivers in S32K

Mixing Autosar and non-autosar drivers

durga_choudhury — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:47:10 GMT

In many of the the examples provided (specifically for S32K148), Autosar compliant and non-compliant drivers are mixed in the same project. A few questions:

1. Is there any guidance on when this is desirable, when this does not matter, and when it is NOT desirable

2. Is it possible to write an application with non-autosar drivers only (that is what I am trying to do)

3. Besides compliance issues, which driver model is better, e.g. with lower memory and CPU usage requirements?

Re: Mixing Autosar and non-autosar drivers

_Leo_ — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 21:45:32 GMT

Thank you for your interest in our products and for contributing to our community.

Regarding your questions:

1. Depending on the context wanted to be used by the upper layer, a specific interface must be used:
○ AUTOSAR context: − High Level Interface usage
○ non-AUTOSAR context: − Low Level Interface usage or − IP Layer (ex-SDK)
2. Yes.
3. The non-AUTOSAR access the hardware directly, therefore, it is highly-optimized code.

I hope this information is helpful.

Re: Mixing Autosar and non-autosar drivers

durga_choudhury — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 16:57:15 GMT

Hello @_Leo_

Thank you for the clarification. However, my original question #1 is still not really answered.

In some of the examples, some of the drivers are from Autosar set and some are from non-autosar set. I understand that 'BaseNXP' is only provided in the non-autosar version, but for all the peripherals, both versions are available.

So to rephrase my question:

Is such 'mixing up' of the driver models a good thing? Are there any 'gotcha's' when mixing up the two models? (For example, for peripheral X, a global is initialized this way in autosar driver but another way in the non-autosar driver). Is there a specific reason the example code is doing it?

Re: Mixing Autosar and non-autosar drivers

_Leo_ — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 21:19:54 GMT

Hi again,

For AUTOSAR context you should use "MCAL" components, meanwhile for non-AUTOSAR context you should use "Driver" components:

If you application requires to be AUTOSAR compliant you should use only "MCAL" components ("BaseNXP" component is the only exception).

If you application do not requires to be AUTOSAR compliant you should use only "Driver" components.

There are cases where there are no "Drivers" component for a certain peripheral, but there is a certain "MCAL" component for such peripheral. In this case, mixing them is recommended. However, keep in mind that your application will ultimately not be AUTOSAR compliant.

What is not recommended is mixing "MCAL" and "Driver" components for the same peripheral.

I hope this information is helpful.

Re: Mixing Autosar and non-autosar drivers

durga_choudhury — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:28:52 GMT

Thank you very much for the clarification.