Arnout Vandecappelle

A open moderated discussion on different aspects of SBOMs, especially oriented towards embedded system images.

Audience participation is expected and encouraged!

Embedded systems need to be provisioned with a root filesystem populated with a collection of packages, much like servers. However, some requirements are slightly different. For example, it is important that the complete filesystem image of an embedded system can be reproduced exactly.

This talk introduces buildroot as a distribution for embedded systems, and compares it with using Debian/Emdebian or derivatives. As usual, neither approach is perfect in all situation, but this talk will help you selecting.

After deploying an embedded system, it is desirable to be able to upgrade the firmware, in order to add new features or to solve bugs. However, it is often difficult and expensive for a technician to get physical access to the device(s). Therefore, it should be possible to perform the upgrade remotely, which also means that it should be secure and survive any kind of failure. In the course of their career the consultants at Essensium/Mind have encountered many failure paths and solutions of how to deal with them. This includes issues like bad firmware, power failure, communication problems, security issues, flash corruption and bootloader bugs. Solutions include fall-back firmware, watchdogs, journalling filesystems, backup media and package managers. But in the end, it turns out that there is no silver bullet and that the best upgrade approach mostly depends on how the system is used.

Buildroot is a nice, simple and efficient tool to build small to medium sized embedded Linux systems. It to automates the process of building a cross-compiling toolchain, the root filesystem with all userspace components, a Linux kernel image and a bootloader image. It is used for embedded systems ranging from industrial controllers to hand-held media devices.