Maintenance

• SWUpdate = Linux device side update agent (100% open source)
• Fail-safe A/B update with roll-back mechanism
• Rescue system with small footprint
• Local and remote updates and as integrated web server
• SWUpdate sends back information about the device status
• Processes signed and encrypted update bundles
• Full and incremental updates
• Zero copy = temporary copies are not necessary
• hawkbit = backend server
• Device authentication
• Can run on a local server or as a cloud service

Maintenance made easy with Mainline Linux

DH electronics contributes to the open source community by uploading new projects to the Mainline Linux kernel. This makes optimizations, improvements and bug fixes available to everyone. You can find the sources for our SOMs and development boards or reference designs in the mainline kernel and use Linux-Next directly for your project.

Since our SOMs are part of the mainline kernel, there are no dependencies on the vendor kernels of the SoC manufacturers, which makes it easier to react quickly to changes or security vulnerabilities. In addition, the BSP contains only a few upstream backports and SOM vendor-specific patches. In light of the Cyber Resilience Act, this flexibility will become even more relevant to keep our customers' systems up to date.

In addition to our own embedded devices, we can also mainline your customized device. Mainline support means updates are not time consuming and are regularly supported by DH. We use a GitLab-based CI/CD pipeline and can also run tests on real customer hardware in our DH test track.

How to keep embedded systems reliably up to date

The LTS mainline kernel updates are released in the 4th quarter of each year. Yocto LTS releases appear every two years in Q2. It is therefore advisable to update a project every two years in Q3 in order to adapt it to the new LTS Yocto and Linux versions. On this basis, DH electronics offers regular LTS updates for both the Linux kernel and Yocto for its Board Support Packages (BSPs).

In addition, smaller release updates can be provided in between. In such cases, the LTS Yocto version remains constant, but all packages are updated and the LTS kernel remains unchanged in the major version, but is updated to the latest available minor version.

To be able to roll out updates, we use SWUpdate as an open source update agent on the Linux device side. As a backend server, we recommend hawkbit, which can be operated either on a local server or as a cloud service.

This approach strives for a balance between stability (by using the LTS version) and utilizing the latest bug fixes and features provided by updated packages and a newer minor version of the Linux kernel. This is our DH strategy for embedded systems to ensure reliability while keeping the system up to date with security patches and improvements.