Apertis v2019dev0 Release

Apertis a Debian derivative distribution geared towards the creation of product-specific images for ARM (both the 32bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 versions using the hardfloat ABI) and Intel x86-64 (64-bit) systems.

Apertis v2019dev0 is the first development release of the Apertis v2019 release flow that will lead to the LTS Apertis v2019.0 release in September 2019.

This Apertis release is the first one to be based on top Debian Buster with several customizations. Test results for the v2019dev0 release are available in the v2019dev0 test report.

Release downloads

Apertis v2019dev0 images
Intel 64-bit
ARM 32-bit (U-Boot)
ARM 64-bit (U-Boot)

The Intel minimal, target and development images are tested on the reference hardware (MinnowBoard MAX), but they can run on any UEFI-based x86-64 system. The sdk image is tested under VirtualBox.

Apertis v2019dev0 repositories

$ deb https://repositories.apertis.org/apertis/ v2019dev0 target helper-libs development sdk hmi

Highlights

Yearly release flow

From now on, Apertis has moved to a yearly-based release schedule to provide a more stable and well defined base for product development.

Every quarter a new development release is published, leading to a yearly stable release released in Q1 with a default support period of 7 quarters.

To transition to the new release flow the first two cycles have been shortened, with a reduced number of development releases along the following schedule:

2019 Q1: v2019dev0
2019 Q2: v2019pre
2019 Q3: v2019.0 + v2020dev0
2019 Q4: v2019.1 + v2020pre
2020 Q1: v2019.2 + v2020.0

The stable releases are intended to both be based on the most recent mainline kernel LTS release and the current Debian stable release. Since Debian releases roughly once every two years, that means that there will typically be two Apertis product releases based on a single Debian stable release. With Linux doing an LTS release on a yearly basis, each Apertis product release will be based on a different (and then current) Linux kernel release.

Rebase to Debian 10 “Buster”

Past releases of Apertis were based on the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) LTS release but with this release Apertis has rebased directly on top of the upcoming Debian 10 “Buster” release.

Debian now offers a longer support period comparable to what Ubuntu provides, and projects like the Civil Infrastructure Platform partnership aim at extending such period even further.

With the rebase the kernel has been upgraded to the Linux kernel 4.19 to bring new features and hardware support, covered by the Super Long Term Support effort as well.

New features

Generic U-Boot images for ARM 32bit

The ARM 32bit images targeting the i.MX6 SABRE Lite boards now share the same generic recipe as the ARM 64bit images and can be booted on any ARM 32bit device that provides the needed U-Boot support.

The new images no longer ship the bootloader and instead assume that U-Boot is installed on-board flash storage.

Current devices thus need to be prepared before being able to boot the v2019dev0 images, see the Change to storage location of U-Boot on NXP SABRE Lite section for more details on the migration.

Automatic offline updates over USB Mass Storage devices with rollback

A technology preview in the 18.12 release, the OSTree-based automatic updater is now fully part of the release.

Software updates for the base OS can be deployed on USB keys that, once plugged to the device, automatically trigger the update process. Also included is the ability to automatically roll back to the previous version if booting the new one fails for any reason.

During this cycle the testcase covering the update process have been automated and are part of the daily LAVA runs, ensuring that no regressions are introduced during development.

Build and integration

Improved reusability of the image recipes

A new recipe action has been introduce in Debos, allowing for recipes to include other recipes.

Product-specific recipes can now use the newly introduced feature to include more generic recipes like the Apertis reference recipes, and in the future the same mechanism will be used to reduce the duplication in the Apertis reference recipes themselves.

Quality Assurance

Automated test report generation

The test results from the daily automated LAVA runs are now collected in a database and a web application renders reports for each run, sending notifications to Mattermost and Phabricator.

Previously the generation of reports required a significant effort as it was entirely manual, so it was done only once a week. Now results for every run of the image building pipeline are captured automatically and made available to developers, significantly improving the feedback loop for developers and managers.

Design and documentation

Sample image recipes

A set of sample image recipes are now provide with the main reference one to provide a smoother learning experience to newcomers and also showcase how product teams can re-use the reference recipes for their needs.

Vehicle API documentation improvements

The internals of the service implementing the Sensors and actuators design, Rhosydd, have been reworked to provide up-to-date, automatically generated documentation for its D-Bus API, complementing the documentation for the C libraries.

The Sensors and actuators has been then updated to describe the currently implemented API rather than the initial draft.

Deprecations and ABI/API breaks

Deprecations

During this release cycle we have continued to mark obsolete or problematic APIs with the ABI break tag as a way to clear technical debt in future.

Mildenhall UI framework

The Mildenhall UI toolkit is deprecated in favour of other UI toolkits such as GTK+, Qt, or HTML5-based solutions: From the next release Apertis may no longer ship the Mildenhall UI toolkit nor any accompanying libraries, as the underlying Clutter library has been deprecated upstream for some years now.

Application framework

ribchester and canterbury are deprecated: From the next release Canterbury and Ribchester are deprecated as is the Application Layout document in favour of Flatpak.

Breaks

Apertis infrastructure tools repository

The Apertis infrastructure repositories replaces the Apertis tools repository

The repository containing the extra packages needed on the Apertis infrastructure hosts is now managed differently and is now available via a new APT source line:

deb https://repositories.apertis.org/infrastructure-v2019/ buster infrastructure

The new repository now target a specific Apertis yearly release to decouple the tools used to build each of the, preventing new updates to cause regressions when building earlier Apertis releases.

See also the “Apertis infrastructure tools” section for more details about the contents of the repository.

Change to storage location of U-Boot on NXP SABRE Lite

U-Boot moved from SD Card to serial EEPROM

The decision has been made to boot the SABRE Lite from U-Boot stored in the EEPROM rather than from the SD Card via a chainloader in the EEPROM. This has the advantage of allowing the SABRE Lite to boot from a common armhf SD Card image, rather than one tailored specifically for the SABRE Lite and aligns with the boot process used on ARM64 targets.

A custom image (called uboot-v2019dev0-installer-mx6qsabrelite.img.gz) is supplied with the v2019dev0 release that will flash U-Boot to the EEPROM on SABRE Lite. This should be run on SABRE Lite boards that will be used with v2019dev0.

To enable earlier versions of Apertis to be run, boot to the v2019dev0 U-Boot prompt and run bmode mmc0. This will cause the SABRE Lite to boot from the SD Card until the board is power cycled.

Infrastructure

Apertis Docker registry

The Apertis Docker registry stores Docker images in order to provide a unified and easily reproducible build environment for developers and services.

As of today, this includes the apertis-image-builder, apertis-package-builder, apertis-testcases-builder and apertis-documentation-builder Docker images.

Apertis infrastructure tools

The Apertis v2019 infrastructure repository provides packages for git-phab, lqa, Debos and deps, LAVA v2, OBS 2.7, ostree-push and jenkins-job-builder for Debian Buster: