Description of a formalized approach to build reproducible Linux images for a project-specific electronics platform

Abstract

For today's processor or microcontroller based electronics platforms it is becoming more important to adopt a powerful operating system together with existing software tools to be able to perform increasingly complex tasks. A natural non-commercial choice is Linux - but in the embedded electronics domain Linux designs tend to be based on commercially available Linux distributions. In contrast to a desktop or server environment, adopting a commercial Linux distribution in the embedded electronics domain often requires substantial up-front investments. This article gives an overview of the specialties and components of an embedded Linux distribution. However, maintenance of such a distribution and transferability of the development environment tend to be rather problematic because of complexity issues. With the help of a presented formalization approach it is possible to modularize the build process which results in an easily manageable source tree for the entire distribution. This leads to reproducible Linux images for project-specific electronics platforms, built in an automated way from and with freely available open source components solely.