- A community that acts like a Linux distribution, but for defining a
boot chain
- (Co-)maintainers for boards
- Hobby SBCs focused on general compute vs. digital signage vs. deeply
embedded products
- LVFS
- Buildroot
- The pitfalls of kconfig including fragments for maintaining multiple
overlapping targets
- Using devicetree to automate configuration of new boards
- e.g. SPI Flash and/or eMMC boot partitions
- Benefits of devicetree vs. ACPI tables
- Raspberry Pi as an example of a community focused product that
leveraged the the community to have immense success in business
- LinuxBoot as a principle with endless possibilities
- U-Boot TPL/SPL, coreboot, oreboot, …
- Why embedded is better?
- SoC vendor accessibility
- Less complexity in chips
- More open source software already in the boot chain
- ARM cores as a pseudo standard
- Hardware is cheaper and more accessible
- BUT distro tooling needs improvement and fewer high performance
options for building
- User expectations around hobbyist boards is extremely low
- x86 OEMs pay third-parties for …
- aarch64 chip vendors are forking everything from boot loaders to
userspace and all reinvent the same things in different ways
- Demo
- Download an image from LVFS, flash to an SD-Card (which programs the
bootchain), and then either provides features to directly boot or
install a Linux system or a distro ISO on a USB stick
- Run mkosi with a graphical frontend, systemd feature to load
pre-built mkosi images, etc