Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

[Posted March 9, 2018 by jake]

On his blog, Peter Robinson announced the acceptance of a new edition of Fedora for the Internet of Things (IoT). He had proposed it as a Fedora "spin", but the Fedora Council decided to make it a full-fledged edition with its own working group. "So what will be happening over the coming weeks (and months)? We’ll be getting the working group in place, getting an initial monthly release process in place so that people can start to have something to kick the tires with and provide feedback and drive discussion. With those two big pieces in place we can start to grow the Fedora IoT community and work out the bits that work and bits that don’t work."

Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

Posted Mar 9, 2018 18:26 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Nice! I've long been searching for a solution for my IoT thingies that will automate updates (and rollbacks) of the base system and apps.

Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

Posted Mar 12, 2018 10:11 UTC (Mon) by zyga (subscriber, #81533) [Link] (1 responses)

You can use Ubuntu Core with snaps for just that today.

Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

Posted Mar 12, 2018 17:45 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

It's close, but not quite there. There's no way to distribute the OS and the applications in one image, so you can test them both before releasing them to the actual device. There are also small nagging problems like not being able to use custom udev rules from snaps.

Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

Posted Mar 10, 2018 22:14 UTC (Sat) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (2 responses)

I read everything linked from the blog entry as well as the council ticket and my understanding about what the IoT edition actually involves is still fuzzy. I guess the video presentation will be more enlightening.

The OSTree references appear to describe an OS for IoT devices big enough to run Linux. That might make for a robust mechanism for software updates in the field. I can only agree with Cyberax that this would be very nice.

Existing Spins and Editions produce live/installation images or pre-built disk images (for ARM) composed from a specific set of packages. The graphic on the wiki page says that this is also the intent for the IoT edition. How would such an image look like to be useful for a wide range of IoT devices? These things aren't general-purpose computing devices, so the software they run tends to differ wildly. I presume these images are more intended as a base for others to build on?

Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

Posted Mar 11, 2018 7:25 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Ideally this should be a base system maintained for a number of commonly used architectures (RPi mostly, whom are we kidding...) that takes care of kernel updates, security patching and so on. A way to bake in applications on top of it, and finally a way to distribute them to devices.

I'm automating my house and my goal is to make everything last for 10 years with minimal maintenance and with ability to swap failing hardware if required.

There are commercial solutions out there that do this and niche OpenSource solutions like https://resinos.io/ that attempt the same, but a committed effort from a top-tier distro would be very welcome.

Robinson: Fedora IoT Edition is go!

Posted Mar 12, 2018 2:05 UTC (Mon) by csirac2 (guest, #99520) [Link]

The release cadence/priorities and vastness of Fedora itself against the things IoT needs is daunting. More focused efforts like OpenEmbedded/Yocto, Buildroot etc are already barely able to deliver and it's their sole purpose... will definitely be watching this space