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Ubuntu Core 22 is now available – optimised for IoT and embedded devices

• former 4y ago
• cbsks 4y ago
  Can you configure it easily for a read only root file system?
• psanford 4y ago
  Do you still have to have a canonical sso account just to login to your own devices? EDIT: The answer appears to still be yes. I don't know who canonical is making this for, but no company is going to want to deploy IoT devices that hand over the root of trust for authentication to a third party. And I have to believe that many individuals/hobbyists that would otherwise be excited to use this will choose another distro for the same reason. Canonical seems to be out of touch with what people actually want, and is happy to build things it likes that will ultimately be irrelevant.
  • yourstruly-br 4y ago
    They have no clue what the market wants. Nobody is going to shell out $15k-20k to build a solution. We lost about 4 months betting on it and eventually moved away. We are glad we did.
    • nix23 4y ago
      >Nobody is going to shell out $15k-20k to build a solution. Well that's not true, if the solution is a success 20k is not much....problem is it rarely is with canonical.
      • yourstruly-br 4y ago
        In our case we were building a solution from scratch. It is very hard to justify upfront costs like that, involving open-source and early in the project. IoT solution costs should move up according to scale. That's why AWS, Azure, and others have grown their IoT offerings. Nobody starts paying $20k upfront to use AWS IoT.
        • nix23 4y ago
          >Nobody starts paying $20k upfront to use AWS IoT. You have not written anything about upfront or IoT. AWS IoT? Is that even a thing? (pun intended)
  • tssva 4y ago
    For individuals and hobbyists Ubuntu Server would likely make more sense than Ubuntu Core. I used to recommend it for use on headless Raspberry Pi's over Raspberry Pi OS. Use of cloud-init and netplan made it much easier for deployment of headless RPi's. Unfortunately for 22.04 they made some changes on the RPi which severely impacted my deployments causing me to move away from Ubuntu on the RPi and to no longer recommend it to others.
    • waveform80 4y ago
      What were the changes in 22.04 on the Pi server images that severely impacted you? (disclosure: I'm probably the one that made those changes, so apologies for that, but I'd like to know what they were in case there's anything I can do about them)
      • tssva 4y ago
        Maybe severely was the wrong word to use. I use RPi's in my home lab so any impact no matter how significant is limited in real world impact. In this case it was limited to loss of access to several services in my home lab for a few hours due to a complete loss of network connectivity to the server and a few hours of my time troubleshooting the issue. The major issue was caused by moving some of the kernel modules to linux-modules-extra package. It caused an issue when I upgraded because the 8021q module needed for vlan support was moved to this package. I lost network connectivity to the first Pi I upgraded due to this. The Pi in question had an ip address assigned to the interface and to vlans configured for the interface. When networkd could not create the vlans on the interface it failed without assigning the ip address to the interface itself. I filed a ticket regarding this. I consider the ability to use vlans to be a fairly basic expectation of a server os especially when it previously worked out of the box. I would also think vlan support to be an expected feature for the IoT gateway role pushed as appropriate for Ubuntu Core. Luckily I was able to connect to the serial console, troubleshoot and eventually correct the issue. When the module which supports a commonly used part of the ethernet family of protocols is moved to an optional package, I would expect testing of the impact to connectivity to existing deployments to take place. This led me to lose some faith in the testing done of Ubuntu on the RPi and the stability of the platform going forward. Switching platforms was easy to do in my case and so I did. Hopefully the recommendations I made in my ticket of either moving the module back to linux-modules or adding an explicit warning to the release notes happens. The current warning regarding some modules having been moved to linux-modules-extra, without any detailing of them including the functionality they tie back to, is completely inadequate.
• dljsjr 4y ago
  Almost more interesting than this announcement by itself is that Canonical is now providing a PREEMPT_RT patched kernel for Ubuntu in general. That's super cool.
• azinman2 4y ago
  What IoT devices are running Ubuntu, and how is it optimized? That it has snap containers? I’m guessing by IoT here they don’t mean light switches running on an embedded processor, but industrial equipment?
  • pantalaimon 4y ago
    It’s typically raspberry pi class edge devices
• yourstruly-br 4y ago
  I highly discourage anyone to use Ubuntu Core as part of their solution. It is a secure environment, yes, but it is a nightmare to configure (snaps) and for everything, expect for the most basic stuff, you will need what is called a "brand store", which costs about $20k/year, regardless if you have 1 or 100 devices. (We could not even make one snap talk to another snap, checking another snap status etc). We had commercial discussions w/ Canonical and we basically moved away.
  • nix23 4y ago
    I completely sprinting away with anything canonical. SUSE/openSUSE/Micro RHEL/Fedora/CoreOS nothing else...no more canonical, too many disappointments and trickery into pay massive at the end of the day.
    • RedShift1 4y ago
      What is Micro RHEL?
      • forgotpwd16 4y ago
        Guess comment is (SUSE/openSUSE/Micro) (RHEL/Fedora/CoreOS).
      • yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        Not RHEL; https://microos.opensuse.org/ https://microos.opensuse.org/
        • nix23 4y ago
          Yes, "Leap Micro", "MicroOS" and "SLE Micro"
  • db65edfc7996 4y ago
    Does the snap store server process still still use 300+ MB of memory? That alone would seem to disqualify it for IOT or other embedded use cases.
• yourstruly-br 4y ago
  This blog also mentions why Ubuntu Core is a bad choice. https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/nextbox-why-we-decided-and-against-ubuntu-core https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/nextbox-why-we-decided-an...
  • aulin 4y ago
    I read that post and as an outsider and one that knows very little about ubuntu core, I seem to understand you need a brand store to access direct hardware functionality, is that so? so you need to pay to be able to use GPIOs, I2C and other hardware peripherals from your snaps? on an IoT OS?!
• barkingcat 4y ago
  For embedded / iot usage, one major issue is device support https://ubuntu.com/certified/devices https://ubuntu.com/certified/devices It does contain raspberry pi's but the list isn't all that great. I had trouble finding 32 bit ARM precompiled binary distributions from ubuntu (that is not a rpi), and had to compile my own kernel + inline it with debian to get 32 bit arm support.
  • n00bface 4y ago
    Smallest thing I've found is a FreeScale SOC running a Cortex-A7.
    • ngrilly 4y ago
      Can you run Linux on a Cortex-M, which is basically a microcontroller, instead of a Cortex-A that has a MMU? I don't think it's possible.
      • glassconclusion 4y ago
        Yes, you can actually. I haven't done this myself, but there are defconfigs for mmu less devices (stm32f4 series for instance). You need some more RAM though, but most evaluation kits don't provide this. Have a look here: https://elinux.org/STM32 https://elinux.org/STM32 I'm planning to give this a spin on an EVK that I got from work if I find the time.
        • kissiel 4y ago
          Linux? yes. Popular distro? not really. Lack of MMU means that all the processes (and shared objects) use the same memory space, so unless you have some way of randomizing where things go (like SELinux), two processes will step on each other's data (MPU will not trigger segfault, as both are allowed to r/w same addr - IIUC). But even when using randomizing, you're playing russian rulette.
          • glassconclusion 4y ago
• rgreen 4y ago
  For alternatives, I’ve been running opensuse microos in some test deployments and am really happy so far.
  • nix23 4y ago
    Have you seen? There is Leap Micro now (the not rolling release, based on SLE 15 sp4), if you need something more predictable/long-term.
• jaywalk 4y ago
  Installation Step 1: An Ubuntu SSO account is required to create the first user on an Ubuntu Core installation. Yeah... no.
  • forgotpwd16 4y ago
    Is Ubuntu Core closed source? If not, can't someone fork it and remove this requirement?
    • jeroenhd 4y ago
      Ubuntu Core seems to be Snap As A Service. Snap is mostly open source (everything except the actual store backend because "it would be complicated" to do that). If you fork it and remove the connection to Ubuntu's cloud ecosystem, you'd probably be end with a barebones Ubuntu Server install. When all you need is Ubuntu Server with Livepatch, you're probably better off using that.
• la_fayette 4y ago
  Look for balenaOS (http://balena.io http://balena.io) if you want an alternative IoT solution. We looked into ubuntu core, which seems like an overkill in complexity. With balena you can get started immetiately with all the tools you already know, like docker etc and have a solution that works...
  • andrewshadura 4y ago
    Another solution would be Apertis (www.apertis.org). Unlike Ubuntu Core, it uses standard technologies like OSTree, Flatpak etc to provide similar features. Disclaimer: I work on Apertis.
    • GordonS 4y ago
      I took a quick look at your landing page, and I've got to say it doesn't do that great a job of telling me what it is or how it works. Are you able to provide a short summary, and maybe compare it to Ubuntu Core and BalenaOS? Would it be suitable for shipping appliances? How do you folks make money? Thanks :)
      • andrewshadura 4y ago
        It is a Debian derivative distribution with a stabilised subset of packages and a recent LTS kernel. Target images use non-GPL-3 software, which some industries require. It also comes with infrastructure for building images, atomic updates and so on. There's a lot of concept documents on the website going into details on those.
      • andrewshadura 4y ago
        When using OSTree, you can build images using regular packages installed with apt, and then deploy them atomically while allowing to rollback the update if necessary. Alternatively you can choose to use Flatpak to deploy applications.
      • andrewshadura 4y ago
        As for money, we have paying customers.
• matthewmacleod 4y ago
  I would also chip in along the same lines as the other comments here and strongly advise against using Ubuntu Core in any application. It's a tempting idea when you first look at it, but in practice it is seriously difficult to build an application with, comes with a lot of constraints, and requires you forking over repeated large sums of money to Canonical with no way out. We had a much better experience with https://www.balena.io https://www.balena.io – quite a different service, but achieves a sweet-spot combination of having an open core with good management tooling that I'm more than happy to pay for.
  • donmcronald 4y ago
    I've never used anything in the product space, but I've read through some of the docs because IoT deployment interests me in the context of most network devices having terrible deployment and update strategies. My favorite sales pitch was always Mender (https://mender.io https://mender.io) because it can be as simple as .img files and slice based booting. Unfortunately they changed their pricing a couple years ago and went from a hobbyist friendly pricing structure where you could scale down to $120 / year to charging for scale and features where the minimum cost to use delta updates is $3k per year. If you want something like mutual TLS authentication it's "call us" pricing. When I looked at Balena I thought the whole architecture looked like a mess of complexity and containers when a simple .img would suffice for most use cases (IMO). It's also too expensive to get into without having a well understood target market for whatever IoT product you're planning to build. IE: No hobbyists or enthusiasts that just want to learn without having something sellable planned out. IMHO all of the IoT deployment solutions charging tons of money for features and scale are a good example of where platforms like Cloudflare could reshape the industry. I think by going "all in" on Cloudflare Pages/Functions/Workers, etc. someone could build a "Cloudflare Native" platform that can afford to dominate the unserved (low-end) portion of those markets, but with the ability to scale up to accommodate the large deployments these companies are trying to attract as customers. I would kill for firewalls and switches that use a slice based, watchdog monitored deployment system like Mender has, but with pricing that's closer to the reality of the small business world.
    • 4y ago
• derefr 4y ago
  Annoyingly, along with this, the Ubuntu "Minimal" network installer is dead (no 22.04 release) — presumably to "encourage" people to move over to this.
  • speedgoose 4y ago
    Yes, I’m more encouraged to move back to Debian personally.
  • josteink 4y ago
    At this point all my from-scratch installs are usually Debian-based where they used to be Ubuntu-based. Canonical seems to completely have lost touch with what the community wants, and with the non-free installer, I find Debian working equally well OOB as Ubuntu has done in the past. The only machines I still keep on Ubuntu are the ones already running it where migrating them will be too much hassle. For my latest laptop, out of curiosity, I also tried Arch. It seems to work fairly well, but I haven’t had enough experience with it yet to “dare” put it on servers.
    • cptnapalm 4y ago
      I'm using Manjaro on my laptop and it's been smooth so far, aside from an initial wifi chipset hiccup. I'm using it also on a laptop-as-a-router. Disabled all the graphical stuff. It's been very good, thus far and only 213 MB of RAM being used after disabling some (but certainly not all) unnecessary services. I do with they had a minimal install for x86_64 like they do for ARM.
• ravenstine 4y ago
  I really never understood this thing about Ubuntu as a minimalist OS for servers and embedded. Almost no matter what, it's going to be more bloated and complicated than just about any other flavor of Linux you can think of. Sure, it works, and there's the factor of familiarity, but just... why? Make Ubuntu the best desktop or mobile OS it can be. Without the original selling point that it fixed problems downstream from Debian and made install easier, what exactly is the point? Ubuntu does some things well, but they've never been good at keeping anything minimal.
  • trufas 4y ago
    I doubt they'll want to compete in the consumer OS space after the ubuntu phone mess.
• synergy20 4y ago
  ubuntu desktop is free for all. canonical needs to go public and do IPO. ubuntu core is one approach to make some money out of the (free) ubuntu brand. Personally I don't use Ubuntu Core, but I understand why it is there.
  • d82nsjk9 4y ago
    > canonical needs to go public and do IPO. why?
    • synergy20 4y ago
      it's their long term goal, to answer your question: everyone needs more money, after all it's not a charity, canonical is a legit business.
      • nix23 4y ago
        >it's their long term goal Why do you know that? >everyone needs more money But canonical need's more employees first...but please good ones ;)
• spicyusername 4y ago
  There seem to be mixed sentiment in this thread around this. One alternative is Fedora CoreOS. https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable