Vioneta Operating System

Vioneta Operating System is a Linux based operating system optimized to host Vioneta and its Add-ons.

Vioneta Operating System uses Docker as its container engine. By default it deploys the Vioneta Supervisor as a container. Vioneta Supervisor in turn uses the Docker container engine to control Vioneta Core and Add-Ons in separate containers. Vioneta Operating System is not based on a regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu. It is built using Buildroot and it is optimized to run Vioneta. It targets single board compute (SBC) devices like the Raspberry Pi or ODROID but also supports x86-64 systems with UEFI.

Features

• Lightweight and memory-efficient
• Minimized I/O
• Over The Air (OTA) updates
• Offline updates
• Modular using Docker container engine

Supported hardware

• Raspberry Pi
• Hardkernel ODROID
• Asus Tinker Board
• Generic x86-64 (e.g. Intel NUC)
• Virtual appliances

See the full list and specific models here

Getting Started

If you just want to use Vioneta the official getting started guide and installation instructions take you through how to download Vioneta Operating System and get it running on your machine.

If you're interested in finding out more about Vioneta Operating System and how it works read on...

Development

If you don't have experience with embedded systems, Buildroot or the build process for Linux distributions it is recommended to read up on these topics first (e.g. Bootlin has excellent resources).

The Vioneta Operating System documentation can be found on the Vioneta Developer Docs website.

Components

• Bootloader:
  • GRUB for devices that support UEFI
  • U-Boot for devices that don't support UEFI
• Operating System:
  • Buildroot LTS Linux
• File Systems:
  • SquashFS for read-only file systems (using LZ4 compression)
  • ZRAM for /tmp, /var and swap (using LZ4 compression)
• Container Platform:
  • Docker Engine for running Vioneta components in containers
• Updates:
  • RAUC for Over The Air (OTA) and USB updates
• Security:
  • AppArmor Linux kernel security module

Development builds

The Development build GitHub Action Workflow is a manually triggered workflow which creates Vioneta OS development builds. The development builds are available at https://os-artifacts.vioneta.com/index.html.