Apertis is a Debian derivative distribution geared towards the creation of product-specific images for ARM (both the 32bit ARMv7 and 64-bit ARMv8 versions using the hardfloat ABI) and Intel x86-64 (64-bit) systems.

Apertis v2023dev2 is the third development release of the Apertis v2023 stable release flow that will lead to the LTS Apertis v2023.0 release in March 2023.

This Apertis release is built on top of Debian Bullseye with several customisations. It currently ships with the Linux kernel 5.15.x LTS series but later releases in the v2023 channel will track newer kernel versions up to the next LTS.

Test results for the v2023dev2 release are available in the following test reports:

Release flow

  • 2021 Q4: v2023dev0
  • 2022 Q1: v2023dev1
  • 2022 Q2: v2023dev2
  • 2022 Q3: v2023dev3
  • 2022 Q4: v2023pre
  • 2023 Q1: v2023.0
  • 2023 Q2: v2023.1
  • 2023 Q3: v2023.2
  • 2023 Q4: v2023.3
  • 2024 Q1: v2023.4
  • 2024 Q2: v2023.5
  • 2024 Q3: v2023.6
  • 2024 Q4: v2023.7

Release downloads

Apertis v2023dev2.0 images
Intel 64-bit fixedfunction hmi base SDK SDK
ARM 32-bit (U-Boot) fixedfunction hmi
ARM 64-bit (U-Boot) fixedfunction
ARM 64-bit (Raspberry Pi) fixedfunction hmi

The Intel fixedfunction and hmi images are tested on the reference hardware (MinnowBoard Turbot Dual-Core), but they can run on any UEFI-based x86-64 system. The sdk image is tested under VirtualBox.

Apertis v2023dev2 repositories

deb https://repositories.apertis.org/apertis/ v2023dev2 target development sdk

New features

Support automated license compliance for Rust packages

The process described in Automated License Compliance has been improved to support Rust packages to provide a more reliable license report. Since Rust packages are statically linked, the process now captures the license of all the build dependencies to generate the package metadata.

New reference AMD 64 hardware selected

As described in AMD 64 reference boards Apertis has chosen UP Squared 6000 as the new reference board to build products. This decision was done after a long research to compare different alternatives since MinnowBoard boards are no longer available. Work to fully support the new board in Apertis is currently in progress.

Build and integration

Aptly publisher support

Based on the concept document Cloud-friendly APT repository publishing the Apertis project now supports aptly as publisher for its repositories which unlocks key features such as:

  • Improved publishing workflow, specially during release periods
  • Support for snapshots natively
  • Support for cloud storage is also in progress and should be made available soon

Newer Apertis development repositories will be published using aptly.

Direct cloud storage support for aptly

As an effort to improve the features in the aptly publisher, changes to support direct cloud storage were proposed upstream. This feature removes the need of a local internal working pool, reducing the local storage requirement, avoiding duplication and reducing maintenance costs. Although not integrated into Apertis yet, the plan is to enable the feature in a future release.

Dashboard improvements

Dashboard is the tool Apertis uses to have a single view of packages’ health for the different supported releases. Newer features has been added to make it more developer friendly such as:

  • Support for different domains of issues
  • Support for different priorities of issues
  • Support for licensing issues

QA Report App with Gitlab issues support

As planned in Moving to Gitlab issues QA Report App has been improved to add support for different bug tracking systems, including Phabricator and Gitlab issues. Thanks to this change Apertis will soon move to Gitlab in order to be able to collect feedback from the community and being more open.

Enhanced QA site

With the goal of providing more coherent information the QA test cases and results are now provided by the QA Report App, which was integrated with the previous lavaphabbridge. This results in a better user experience and reduces the costs associated with maintaining multiple different applications/repositories to view test cases and track reports.

Documentation and designs

Apertis test strategy

This release includes the new concept document Apertis test strategy advertising the test strategy Apertis applies to provide a high quality distribution and explaining the different testing loops in the development and release workflow.

Documentation refresh to match the switch to Flatpak

Continuing with the effort of updating documentation after switching to Flatpak, this release also includes a reviewed version of several documents related to the Application Framework to provide developers with the best practices to build their applications.

Deprecations and ABI/API breaks

Regressions

No known regressions.

Deprecations

No known deprecations

Breaks

No know breaks

Infrastructure

Apertis Docker images

The Apertis Docker images provide a unified and easily reproducible build environment for developers and services.

As of today, this includes the apertis-base, apertis-image-builder, apertis-package-source-builder, apertis-flatdeb-builder, apertis-documentation-builder, and apertis-testcases-builder, Docker images.

Images

Image daily builds, as well as release builds can be found at https://images.apertis.org/

Infrastructure overview

The Apertis Image Recipes provides an overview of the image building process and the involved services.

Known issues

After intensive testing in LAVA on both v2023dev2 and v2023dev1 we’ve detected a very rare filesystem error when using OSTree images. This issue is very hard to reproduce and still under investigation but the system should be able to recover automatically from it.

High (22)

  • T8456 aum-api: test failed
  • T8470 secure-boot-imx6 test failed
  • T8530 evolution-sync-bluetooth test not available in v2022 and v2023dev1 testcase page
  • T8545 BOM file generation pick default license
  • T8547 sanity-check: test failed
  • T8603 AUM fails to detect rollback on Lava for RPi64 board
  • T8604 AUM tests fails on Lava for RPi64 board
  • T8660 Random FS issues on OSTree images
  • T8689 Branching for v2023dev2 disabled CI for several projects
  • T8729 “Segmentation fault” observed during enabling BT and Wifi dongle
  • T8749 aum-offline-upgrade-signed: test failed
  • T8757 aum-ota-api: test failed
  • T8762 aum-ota-signed: test failed
  • T8763 aum-out-of-space: test failed
  • T8764 dbus-dos-reply-time: test failed
  • T8765 aum-ota-auto: test failed
  • T8772 aum-power-cut: test failed
  • T8789 API test
  • T8790 aum-ota-rollback-blacklist: test failed
  • T8803 QA Report App: Pipeline fails to test MR
  • T8822 aum-offline-upgrade: test failed
  • T8823 connman: test failed

Normal (41)

  • T2896 Crash when initialising egl on ARM target
  • T3920 arm-linux-gnueabihf-pkg-config does not work with sysroots installed by ade
  • T5748 System users are shipped in /usr/etc/passwd instead of /lib/passwd
  • T5896 sdk-dbus-tools-bustle testcase is failing
  • T5900 evolution-sync-bluetooth test fails
  • T6024 sdk-dbus-tools-d-feet: folks-inspect: command not found
  • T6111 traprain: 7_traprain test failed
  • T6292 gettext-i18n: test failed
  • T6349 sdk-code-analysis-tools-splint: 3_sdk-code-analysis-tools-splint test failed
  • T6366 sdk-cross-compilation: 10_sdk-cross-compilation test failed
  • T6768 Fix the kernel command line generation in OSTRee for FIT image
  • T6773 HAB testing: the unsigned image may pass validation in several circumstances
  • T6795 SabreLite failing to boot due to failing “to start udev Coldplug all Devices”
  • T6806 HAB on SabreLite in open state accepts any signed kernel regardless of the signing key
  • T7000 DNS resolution does not work in Debos on some setups
  • T7512 debos sometimes fails to mount things
  • T7721 Fakemachine in debos immediately powers off and hangs in v2021 and v2022dev1 when using UML on the runners
  • T7785 DNS over TLS does not work on systemd-resolve
  • T7817 rhosydd: test failed
  • T7819 newport: test failed
  • T7852 Investigate test failure TestGetSourceMount
  • T7859 spymemcached: Investigate failing test due to hostname mismatch
  • T7872 Error building package ruby-redis on OBS
  • T7879 sdk-debos-image-building: test failed
  • T7923 Gitlab pipeline OBS job reported “success” but OBS build was “unresolvable”
  • T7945 evolution-sync-bluetooth test fails
  • T8175 License scan fails on package texlive-extra
  • T8194 ci-license-scan prints final error paragraph in the middle of scan-copyrights output
  • T8281 dashboard: gnome-settings-daemon-data incorrectly flagged as missing the git repository
  • T8504 LAVA/Phab bridge timeouts
  • T8516 apparmor-pipewire: test failed
  • T8524 grilo: test failed
  • T8572 Missing warning on coreutils overwrite
  • T8613 apparmor-functional-demo: test failed
  • T8622 Manual testcase results should not have any hyperlink in the LavaPhabridge report page
  • T8629 frome: test failed
  • T8634 Failed to start Access poi…server : logs seen in v2023dev1 Amd64 boot logs
  • T8667 cgroups-resource-control: test failed
  • T8668 Test apparmor-chaiwala-system does not work properly on OSTree images
  • T8683 “firmware: failed to load” logs seen during boot
  • T8748 sdk-docker: test failed