Articles by Enrico Jörns
Signed FIT Image Support for meta-oe (fitimage.bbclass)
FIT images provide a versatile way to bundle components used to boot embedded Linux systems, like the kernel, device tree, ramdisk, firmware, etc. They also support cryptographic signatures, making them ideal for verified boot setups. This blog post introduces the new fitimage.bbclass in meta-oe as an alternative to oe-core's kernel-fitimage.bbclass, with a clear focus on enhancing both versatility and signing support.
Bringing Barebox into OE-Core (Yocto)
This blog post chronicles the multi-year journey to get Barebox accepted into OE-Core—from the early attempts to the eventual success in October 2024. Along the way, we’ll explore the technical hurdles we faced, the community discussions that shaped the process, and the improvements we added to both OE and Barebox.
RAUC v1.12 Released
With 93 pull requests that brought in 248 new commits, a lot happened since the last release on master (v1.11.1). The new v1.12 version of RAUC focusses on making it even more robust while adding some features and improvements.
Pengutronix 2023: A Year in Review - Part III
In the third and final part of our retrospective series, we look at our sister company Linux Automation GmbH, which, in addition to moving into new premises, has used the year to bring the long-awaited LXA TAC (Test Automation Controller) closer to market maturity despite all adversities. The colleagues provide a brief review and insight into this, as well as into current further developments of existing products.
Pengutronix 2023: A Year in Review - Part II
In the second part of our review, we will focus, among other things, on the work of our graphics and multimedia team, which again covers the entire Linux stack, from the kernel to mesa to Pipwire, Weston and Webkit has accommodated a whole range of bug fixes, extensions and adjustments to cover the requirements of a wide range of customer projects.
Pengutronix 2023: A Year in Review - Part I
Another exciting yet challenging year has passed. We are a year closer to the Y2038 problem, OpenSSL 1.1.1 is finally history, kernel v4.14 from 2017 will finally be discontinued in four weeks, upcoming LTS kernels will only be supported for two years. The relevance of Linux, not just in embedded systems, is soaring. Simultaneously, the European (Open Source) software world faces necessary but challenging transformations, heralded by the upcoming Cyber Resilience Act.
RAUC v1.11 Released
Ho Ho ho! As the year's progress bar approaches 99%, another update is already completed: RAUC v1.11 is here!
RAUC v1.10 Released
Just in time for the EOSS 2023 in Prague, we have released v1.10 of RAUC. Just-in-time means the release was actually finalized by Jan Lübbe in the train to Prague (like I finally wrote the majority of this blog post on the train back).
RAUC v1.9 Released
"Getting things off the ground" could be the motto for the v1.9 release of RAUC. The support for custom metadata in the manifest got a step further, a new, more flexible, D-Bus API for bundle inspection paved the way for obtaining more detailed information, and a new manifest hash marks the first of several planned changes for configurable event logging. However, one of the most invasive changes happened under the hood: We have started the transition from autotools to meson as a build system.
2022 at Pengutronix
At Pengutronix and in the embedded Linux world in general, exciting things happen all year round, but a carry in the date field is a great opportunity to sit back and talk about it. In the broad categories of kernel, open source software, hardware and public relations we want to tell you what happened at Pengutronix in 2022.
Saving Download Bandwidth with RAUC Adaptive Updates
Based on RAUC's HTTP(S) streaming capabilities, adaptive updates are a generic concept in RAUC to allow saving download bandwidth and form an alternative to conventional delta updates. This post introduces both the generic concept as well the first implemented method 'block-hash-index'.
RAUC v1.8 Released
When September ends and summer is over, it's a good opportunity to take advantage of the shorter days and comfortably update to the latest RAUC version we have just released into the wild: v1.8
RAUC v1.7 Released
Better late than never: Finally, here is our blog post for RAUC v1.7, which was released a month ago.
Pengutronix at Embedded World 2022
Welcome to our booth at the Embedded World 2022 in Nürnberg!
Tutorial: Start With RAUC Bundle Encryption Using meta-rauc
In its current master branch, RAUC now supports encrypted Bundles. This tutorial will introduce you to the basics of using encryption in RAUC and show how to use it in a simplified Yocto setup with the meta-rauc Layer.
RAUC v1.6 Released
While major changes are about to come, the RAUC v1.6 release already paves the way under the hood. Built-in streaming support will be one of the next features built on top of the 'verity' bundle format in RAUC.
Tutorial: Evaluating RAUC on QEMU - A Quick Setup With Yocto
RAUC is an update framework for safely deploying verified updates on your embedded Linux devices. It ensures atomicity of the update process to protect from sudden power outages, hardware failures, etc. So, why would one like to run RAUC on an emulated platform?
rauc-hawkbit-updater v1.0 Released
Back in 2018, rauc-hawkbit-updater was started by Prevas A/S as a C/GLib port of our rauc-hawkbit Python prototype (also called RAUC hawkBit Client) that was mainly developed for showcases and to serve as a demonstration and evaluation platform for others.
Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2021
On Tuesday, 25th and Wednesday, 26th, the 3rd edition of the Yocto Project Virtual Summit took place on the internet. With a fair ticket price of 40$ Pengutronix developers Jan Lübbe and Enrico Jörns got a 2-day long wild ride through the latest features, workflows and experiences with the Yocto Project.
Showcase: Fail-Safe (OTA) Field Updating
Being able to robustly and securely update embedded systems and IoT devices in the field is a key requirement of every product today. The update framework RAUC is the basis for a modern and future-proof solution. In this showcase we present the basic principles of a fail-safe update system and how Pengutronix can support you with implement this for your platform.
RAUC v1.5 Released
This release fixes a vulnerability in RAUC that can be exploited under certain circumstances to achieve a local privilege escalation. It provides both a mitigation for the vulnerability when using the existing bundle format as well as a new bundle format that uses dm-verity to continuously authenticate the update data while it is installed.
RAUC v1.4 Released
It's been 3 weeks ago now since the tag for RAUC 1.4 was created. But it is vacation time and so we have a good excuse for communicating things with some delay. Fortunately, the media team is back now and so also those of you who haven't noticed the new release yet will be informed about notable changes.
ELC-NA 2020 - A Virtual Experience
In 2020, things tend to be a bit different from what we had before. This is also true for this year's Embedded Linux Conference in North America. The need for keeping physical distance required the Linux Foundation to switch form a real conference to a fully virtual one.
RAUC v1.3 Released
Here it is, commit number 1700, 291 commits after the v1.2 tag: The v1.3 release of RAUC is out in the wild and adds a lot of new and useful features together with some fixes.
#FlattenTheCurve – Introducing Our Remote Setup
The Corona crisis is a challenge that has hit many people as well as most companies quite unexpectedly. The entire team of Pengutronix wants to thank those that currently ensure our essential supplies, health system and civil infrastructure!
Pengutronix at Embedded World 2020
Yesterday, Embedded World started, in normal times one of the largest trade shows for embedded development in Europe. While many exhibitors (and thus maybe also lots of visitors) have canceled their presence due to the coronavirus, we present our booth and our demo show cases as usual.
FOSDEM 2020 – Recommended Talks
FOSDEM is one of the biggest Open Source community meetings in Europe and takes place in Brussels at the Université Libre de Bruxelles every year in February. For Pengutronix this is always a good chance to meet developers, discuss current topics and enjoy some Belgian beer and food. This year we attended FOSDEM with 15 colleagues. Here are some talks our colleagues recommend you to see.
OpenEmbedded Workshop 2020
This year, co-located to the FOSDEM in Brussels, the first OpenEmbedded workshop was held. About 30 OpenEmbedded (and Yocto Project) enthusiasts - from the developers of the first hour to those still collecting their first experiences - got together at the DigitYser tech hub in Brussels. Pengutronix attended with their two developers most involved in OpenEmbedded: Jan Lübbe and Enrico Jörns.
RAUC v1.2 Released
Right before the ELC-E starts tomorrow, we used the time in the hotel to bake a brand new RAUC release for you (and your embedded devices)! Well, here it is: RAUC v1.2
Safe and Secure Field Updates of Embedded Linux Systems
In this blog post I would like to address the challenges of performing unattended and verified updates of embedded Linux systems in the field using open source software and workflows. While updating is not a end in itself, a second part of my considerations goes even further and also works out the necessities and possible workflows for keeping the software stack of a project up to date and thus either preventing security issues or at least enabling a short reaction time in case of severe CVE'S discovered.
RAUC v1.1 Released
Just before the beautiful shine of the new has fully disappeared from RAUC 1.0, it is now time to bring out a new release: v1.1.
A Logo for labgrid
It took us a while to find a good logo for one of our latest (but already quite-a-few-years-out) software projects, called labgrid. In case you have not heard of it yet, feel free to read our short blog post from 2017 or visit labgrid's GitHub page.
RAUC v1.0 Released
Four days before Christmas Pengutronix prepared a very special present that probably many of you have been waiting for: The 1.0 version of RAUC!
RAUC v0.4 Released
The RAUC team is proud to announce that we've just released RAUC v0.4!
Pengutronix at FOSDEM 2018
As in the previous years a bunch of Pengutronix developers attended the FOSDEM Open Source conference in Brussels to stay up-to-date with the latest developments in the context of embedded Linux, graphics and media, electronics and lots of other interesting topics.
RAUC v0.3 Released
The RAUC team is proud to announce that we've just released RAUC v0.3! Again, we have worked a lot on stability and support for more and more use cases. RAUC now supports pure UEFI-based booting on x86, multiple board variants in the same bundle, intermediate certificates and enhanced feedback from the boot selection layer.
PTXdist.org: Departure into a new Age
Over the past months, we did a lot of work in giving some open source projects maintained by Pengutronix folks the attention they deserve while also being more open to the community and ease contributing to and using them.
Bridging the Gap: The RAUC hawkBit Client
OTA field updates are a common requirement in modern embedded device deployments. The larger the amount of devices to control, the more important is having a good infrastructure that is reliable in updating and smart in rolling out the software.
RAUC v0.2 Released
We proudly just sent out a new release of the RAUC update framework.
Comprehensive RAUC Documentation Update
As in many projects, also in RAUC phases of extensive development did often not leave sufficient time to explain the latest changes, new features or at least some basic concepts in an appropriate manner.
Pengutronix Becomes Yocto Project Participant
Not at least since the Yocto project cannot be thought away from the embedded world, Pengutronix successfully also uses OpenEmbedded next to PTXdist as a distribution build tool in various projects for several years.