Concept Designs

Due to the nature of Apertis and its target markets there are licensing terms that are problematic and that forces the project to look for alternatives packages. The coreutils package is good example of this situation as its license changed to GPLv3 and as result Apertis cannot provide it in the target repositories and images. The current solution of shipping an old version which precedes the license change is not tenable in the long term, as there are no upgrades with bugfixes or new features for such important package. [Read More]

Apertis has a slowly growing number of test cases that have been written over the years that the Apertis project has been running. Effort has been made to automate many of these tests, however many still remain as manually run testing scenarios. Due to limited testing bandwidth, many of these manual tests are not frequently performed. Additionally there may be automated tests that are being run that, due to changes in the focus and direction of the Apertis project since it’s inception, are no longer particularly useful. [Read More]

The Apertis distribution provides both a development environment for electronic devices as well as a software stack to be used on them. In line with this goal, the Apertis project strives to provide software components that, where there is intent that they form part of the software stack on the devices themselves, are free from licensing constraints that may make it unsuitable in certain use cases. An example is software licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL-3 (General Public License) or LGPL-3 (Lesser General Public License) which are known to present a problem as they sometimes conflict with regulatory requirements and thus Apertis will take measures to avoid such packages being provided as part of the “target” package repositories. [Read More]

A Linux system such as those assembled by Apertis contain components licensed under many different licenses. These various licenses impose different conditions and it is important to understand to a good degree of fidelity the terms under which each component is provided. We are proposing to implement an automated process to generate software Bills Of Materials (BOMs) which detail both the components used in Apertis and the licensing that applies to them. [Read More]

Some projects that wish to use Apertis have a requirement for strong security measures to be available in order to implement key system level functionality. A typical use case is enabling the decryption of protected content in such a way that doesn’t allow the owner of the device doing the decryption to access the decryption keys. Another use for strong security is the protection of authentication keys. By shielding such keys within these strong security measures, it becomes much harder for the keys to be stolen and be used to impersonate the legitimate user. [Read More]

As a platform, Apertis needs a vibrant ecosystem to thrive, and one of the foundations of such ecosystem is being friendly to application developers and product teams. Product teams and application developers are more likely to choose Apertis if it offers flows for building, shipping, and updating applications that are convenient, cheap, and that require low maintenance. To reach that goal, a key guideline is to closely align to upstream solutions that address those needs and integrate them into Apertis, to provide to application authors a framework that is made of proven, stable, complete, and well documented components. [Read More]

Immutable root filesystems have several security and maintainability advantages, and avoiding changes to them increases the value of testing as the system under test would closely match the production setup. This is fundamental for setups that don’t have the ability to install packages at runtime, like OSTree-based deployments, but it’s largely beneficial for package based setups as well. To achieve that, tests should then ship their own dependencies in a self-contained way and not rely on package installation at runtime. [Read More]

This document describes the goals and the approaches for automating the management of the infrastructure used by Apertis. It will focus in particular on release branching since the new release flow implies that Apertis will need to go through that process two or three times more than in the past on each quarter. Goals Data-driven Separating the description of the desired infrastructure state from the tools to apply it nicely separates the two concerns: in most cases the tools won’t need to be updated during branching, only the desired infrastructure state changes. [Read More]

Apertis is a mature platform that is compatible with modern and flexible solutions for software distribution and software update. This document describes user-driven and operator-driven use cases, explores the challenges of each use case to extract requirements, and finally propose building blocks for software distribution and software update. Terminology Application and services Application and services are loosely defined terms that indicate single functional entities from the perspective of end users. However each application may be composed of more than one component: [Read More]

This document extends the higher-level Applications and Security design documents to go into more detail about the Flatpak-based permissions model. Applications can perform many functions on a variety of user data. They may access interfaces that read data (such as contacts, network state, or the users location), write data, or perform actions that can cost the user money (like sending SMS). As an example, the Android operating system has a comprehensive manifest that govern access to a wide array of functionality. [Read More]