An operating system (OS) that’s good enough for the International Space Station (ISS) should be good enough to form a basis for future distributions (distros) that have new use cases across the burgeoning zone of edge computing in the contemporary era of cloud, right?
Debian has been deployed on the ISS at various points, and the OS in its purest form has now been around for over 30 years since it was first developed in 1993. One of its latest variants has now been bottled for developer engagement and use at what its project founders promise is an enterprise-grade level.
Drinking in eLxr
The eLxr project (pronounced: “elixer” as in drink) is dedicated to producing and maintaining an open source Debian-derivative distribution designed to be easy to adopt. Designed to fully honor the open source philosophy and stemming from what might be the more maverick programming teams inside Windriver – a company known for its real-time OS technologies used in edge and embedded computing environments – eLxr draws on and inherits the intelligent edge capabilities of Debian. Immediate future plans are already in place to expand these features for a more streamlined edge-to-cloud deployment approach.
This is a Linux distribution designed to address the special challenges of so-called “near-edge” networks and workloads. To clarify this term, we can think of far edge as Internet of Things (IoT) devices that exist as far from the cloud datacenter as possible; these units are designed to run dedicated applications that are specifically tasked with the location in which they are found. Near edge is a little closer to the cloud datacenter and might also be considered in the realm of “fog computing”, a decentralized approach to infrastructure where compute, analytics and storage exist between the device and data source and the datacenter.
Why Debian?
“The eLxr project chose Debian for two primary reasons: Debian’s staunch defense and adherence to the open source philosophy for more than 30 years and its embrace of derivative efforts,” explained Mark Asselstine, principal technologist at Wind River. “Debian encourages the creation of new distributions and derivatives, such as eLxr, that help expand its reach into various use cases. Debian sees sharing experiences with derivatives as a way to expand the community, improve the code for the existing users, and make Debian suitable for a more diverse audience.”
Announced at the DebConf24 conference in South Korea this summer, the eLxr project’s mission boasts the ability to release technologies at various stages of Debian’s development lifecycle and to introduce innovative new content not yet available in Debian highlights eLxr’s agility and responsiveness to emerging needs.
Rationalizing why eLxr has come about, Asselstine points out that (over the past decade in particular) a number of “build from source” solutions such as the Yocto Project and Buildroot have been favored for enabling various use cases at the intelligent edge. Proving a little more context, he notes that traditional methods of building embedded Linux devices deployments, do indeed offer extensive customizations and the ability to generate a Software Development Kit (SDK) providing a cross-development toolchain.
On a positive note, these projects have allowed developers to maximize the performance of resource-constrained devices while offloading build tasks to more powerful machines.
A Different Architectural Approach
“However, the increasing connectivity demands of edge deployments, including over-the-air (OTA) updates and new paradigms such as data aggregation, edge processing, predictive maintenance and various machine learning features, necessitate a different architectural approach for both near-edge devices and servers,” said Asselstine. “This results in using multiple distributions, creating a heterogeneous landscape of operating environments and increasing complexity and cost. Such complexities impose significant burdens — the need to monitor for CVEs and bugs, use of additional SBOMs and diverse update cadences and many other challenges.”
In an effort to address these issues and provide a more homogeneous solution, eLxr uses modern software tools to ease maintenance while combining traditional installers with a new set of distro-to-order tools that allow a single distribution to better service edge and server deployment.
The project team say that the new OS is underpinned by a unified tech stack to help optimize edge deployments and an operating environment across devices.
Our Future Edge
As we now enter an era where smart cities are becoming massively connected, when consumer-level intelligent devices are proliferating in homes, at a time when air-gapped software solutions are emanating from vendors targeting remote/harsh deployment zones, the need for a new approach to edge operating systems does not seem far-fetched. Let’s see if the ISS calls down for a reinstall.
