Tiers definition

This document outlines the different support tiers Apertis provides for reference hardware as part of its baseline. Additional hardware may also be supported thanks to community contributions. The information in this document aims to clarify the expected functionality, testing and maintenance provided by Apertis for each supported platforms based on the Technical Vision.

Tier 1: Full support

Hardware in this tier is expected to function seamlessly with the reference images available. The boards are tested on a daily basis with automated test cases and issues are created in case of failures. Additionally, these boards are also tested with manual test cases regularly to ensure functionality and to cover use cases that are difficult to automate.

As a key feature for production environments, boards in this tier support atomic, reliable and efficient OTA updates.

Another important requirement for boards in this group is to have clear documentation to allow developers to quickly ramp up during hardware bring-up.

The features provided by each board/image may be limited by their architecture or hardware support.

Tier 2: Basic support

Hardware in this tier is expected to function without big issues with the reference images available. The boards are tested on a daily basis with automated test cases and issues are created in case of failures. Unlike the full support, however, no manual tests are performed.

Also, compared to Tier 1, the boards in this category may support atomic, reliable and efficient OTA updates, but this is not a strict requirement.

Similar to Tier 1, boards in this group are required to have documentation to improve developer experience. Also, the features provided by each board/image may be limited by architecture or hardware support.

Tier 3: Minimal support

Hardware inside this group is maintained by the community, which provide hardware packs and image recipes, that are used in Apertis CI to generate images. Community also test images and submit issues in case of unexpected behavior occurs. In this context both testing, reporting and fixing is provided on a best-effort basis.

Other support

As mentioned before, besides the hardware in the support tiers, other hardware may be supported thanks to the community work, even if there are no reference images. It is worth noting that Apertis is a Debian derivative, in consequence, the hardware supported by Debian in the currently supported architectures is also supported by Apertis.

Summary