Welcome to the 37th issue of TMPDIR, a weekly newsletter covering Embedded Linux, IoT systems, and technology in general. Subscribe to future issues at https://tinyletter.com/tmpdir and pass it on to anyone else you think might be interested. Please send any tips or feedback to info@tmpdir.org.

The newsletter has been in hiatus for the past month or so due to our travel schedules.

Linux

Yoe Distro 2022.06 - “Rygja” Release

This is relatively light release due to summer holidays and time-off -- we could still pull off a release so that's a good thing. Few noteworthy changes are:

  • Networkmanager defaults to nftables instead of iptables
  • systemd is bumped to 251.2 release
  • ptest ( package tests ) can now be compiled with parallelism turned on and a knob is provided to disable it for offending recipes.
  • Go compiler got updated to 1.18.3 (latest point release in 1.18 release)
  • Polkit now uses mozjs again instead of duktape due to regressions observed with duktape defaults.

Linux distributions and rolling Releases

We have been using rolling release for Yoe distro, and we also use rolling distributions e.g. ArchLinux as our default workstation Operating systems for quite a while. It has been a good experience -- especially when you are a small team, it's generally good to get latest updates and less work to integrate as you run into current issues seen with fresh releases of packages. Upstream developers are more responsive to the latest releases or tip of trunk of their projects. An interesting post about google's internal distro turning to rolling release process is another distro turning towards this process.

IoT

v0.3.0 of Simple Iot has been released with many internal improvements. The application lifecycle has been simplified so that the entire app can easily be started and stopped in a unit test. This allows us to do end-to-end testing of the entire application. We've also started using Generics (available in Go 1.18) in various places -- that is working out really well. Another shift is the focus on "clients". Eventually most of Simple IoT will be clients where they simply subscribe and publish information as needed. Clients can live inside the application or be external. We are also working on support for serial connections to Microcontrollers. This will allow MPUs and MCUs to easily share information in a system.

Other

Started experimenting with a rPI PICO -- the build system is nice.

Also did some experimenting with Tinygo.

A nice article on writing. Writing is a privilege and a great opportunity.

Quote for the week

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it. - Alan Perlis (1st recipient of the Turing Award)

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Thanks for reading!

Khem and Cliff