Baurzhan Ismagulov

Debian has a long history in embedded usage. But today many people first think of Yocto when it comes to embedded Linux. The reasons are not only related to the countless Yocto-based board support packages on the market. There are benefits over standard distributions. However, if you step back from the messy details you easily run into when doing this for profit, you may wonder: "Do I really need to build EVERYTHING from scratch when the degree of customization gets less and less?" Combining the best of both worlds is the goal of the Isar image build system: a huge pool of pre-built, well tested, long maintained Debian packages with the flexibility and reusability of image descriptions via bitbake and Yocto-like layers. In this talk, we will provide an introduction to this approach, explaining the motivation based on first industrial application scenario. When does it take more than a simple bootstrap script while building product images? We will furthermore point out why we were specifically choosing Debian as foundation, and were we see a place of this approach and its tooling inside Debian, embedded and maybe also beyond.

Other people: Jan Kiszka

Building products requires putting together many components. There are source-based distributions supporting that process. Using a pre-built, pre-tested binary distribution like Debian has its advantages.

Isar is a system for image generation using binary packages. It uses mainstream tools and workflows to build multiple products, managing common subsystems, and maintaining components from different vendors.

In this talk, Baurzhan will describe the motivation for Isar, its current state, advantages and challenges to overcome.