[HN Gopher] Ubuntu Core 22 is now available - optimised for IoT ...
___________________________________________________________________
Ubuntu Core 22 is now available - optimised for IoT and embedded
devices
Author : pantalaimon
Score : 105 points
Date : 2022-06-15 12:51 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ubuntu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ubuntu.com)
| derefr wrote:
| Annoyingly, along with this, the Ubuntu "Minimal" network
| installer is dead (no 22.04 release) -- presumably to "encourage"
| people to move over to this.
| josteink wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes, I'm more encouraged to move back to Debian personally.
| spicyusername wrote:
| There seem to be mixed sentiment in this thread around this.
|
| One alternative is Fedora CoreOS.
|
| https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable
| psanford wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| 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.
| yourstruly-br wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| >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)
| yourstruly-br wrote:
| 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.
| curt15 wrote:
| Buying a Brand Store is also the only official way to have full
| control of snap updates. Someone at Canonical must have been
| taking notes from Microsoft -- take away control from users and
| sell it back in an "enterprise edition".
| GordonS wrote:
| No issue with Canonical making some money from their OSS
| efforts, but as-is the pricing seems crazy. At the least, I
| wish they'd do something like make brand stores free for less
| than 100 devices. That would also serve to hook people in,
| then they pay as they grow.
|
| Ideally though, Canonical would let anyone run their own
| "brand store" on their own hardware.
| discreteevent wrote:
| If you've only got one device then it probably doesn't make
| sense. But if you have a number of devices, you probably have a
| business and need to make sure that you can reliably and
| securely update them remotely. How many developer/ops hours do
| you think that would take? 20k doesn't buy you much in dev
| hours these days.
| brnt wrote:
| Been a huge fanboy since Warthog, but as of 20.04 I've sought
| refuge elsewhere. Turns out, Ubuntu isn't nearly as user
| friendly as it was back then, in fact, it's one of the least
| user friendly distros these days! Everybody progressed and you
| deserve t check it out yourself!
| tomcam wrote:
| What's your new distro of choice?
| capableweb wrote:
| Not the one you're replying to, but started my Linux
| experience with Ubuntu 6.10, was using it all the way up to
| ~17, and started using Arch Linux after that since during
| my time of using Ubuntu, I learnt enough Linux that I could
| setup my own system (and of course, with the help of the
| awesome Arch Wiki).
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| Worth noting that Arch has had something resembling the
| OpenBSD installer for some time. Trying it out doesn't
| require reading 20 wiki articles as it did back in my
| day(tm). You answer a few questions, wait a few minutes,
| and it's done.
|
| https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
| capableweb wrote:
| Wow, that's great, haven't seen that before! Granted, it
| was some time ago I did a setup from scratch.
|
| Seems that installer is like 90% on the way to be useful
| as a general installer. At a glance, seems to missing
| things like networking setup (as most people use WiFi
| these days, it seems), but at least it takes care of most
| things you need for a install.
| ab_testing wrote:
| Linux Mint for everyday use. It made my 10 year old hot
| running laptop into a cold mean machine.
| hoppyhoppy2 wrote:
| Linux Mint Debian Edition, or the regular version based
| on Ubuntu?
| 8bitbuddhist wrote:
| Not OP, but Pop OS is a great Ubuntu derivative.
| nullcipher wrote:
| Is that not for desktops? What is the alternative for
| servers?
| kbaker wrote:
| We switched our base server build OS to Debian. Has been
| great so far and runs with very low resources / extra
| fluff.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| If you want to set it up and forget about it, just use
| any RHEL clone (AlmaLinux is by far the fastest with
| updates: it took them like a week to ship RHEL 9 after
| the official release). You set up the system, install &
| enable `dnf-automatic`, and forget that it exists for the
| next 10 years.
|
| If AlmaLinux (or any other clone) dies for some reason,
| you can always move to another clone without re-
| installation (using their tool `elevate`).
| huachimingo wrote:
| Anything that has a sane package system (apt, etc), and is
| able to install LXDE and use it out of the box.
|
| Then, put dwm/[your fav. wm] on top of it, with some
| autoservices for bluetooth, mtp and stuff.
| GordonS wrote:
| I like Ubuntu, and looked into using Ubuntu Core for an IoT
| architecture a few years ago - but the "brand store", which
| IIRC is mandatory for private deployments, are complete
| madness.
|
| Plus, while the _concept_ behind Snaps is interesting, in
| practice they seem to be nearly universally reviled.
| nullcipher wrote:
| it's reviled because nobody wants to learn yet another
| deployment tool. apt has been reliable enough for installing
| packages and good enough UX that people can't be bothered
| theamk wrote:
| Nope, it's reviled because of its hostile user experience.
| Try finding an official, working way to stop automatic snap
| updates!
| rtp4me wrote:
| The only way I got it working was via:
| snap set system proxy.http="http://127.0.0.1:1111"
| snap set system proxy.https="http://127.0.0.1:1111"
|
| I started a thread [0] on the LXD container forum in 2019
| due to all the issues with automatic snaps
|
| https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/disable-snap-auto-
| refr...
| GordonS wrote:
| Was going to say the same thing. IMO the snap _concept_
| would make it worth learning something new for some use
| cases - but forced automatic snap updates, high memory
| usage, long startup times and permission issues are not
| selling it. Moreover, Canonical is well aware of how snap
| is perceived, and has done diddly squat to fix it.
| josteink wrote:
| > Plus, while the concept behind Snaps is interesting, in
| practice they seem to be nearly universally reviled.
|
| It might be worth mentioning that a more open, community
| driven and decentralized option offering mostly the same
| concepts exists in the way of Flatpak and Flathub.
| j1elo wrote:
| And that Linux Mint, a very good derivation of Ubuntu LTS,
| made the choice to ditch Snap and integrate Flatpak instead
| in their version of the Software Store.
| nix23 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What is Micro RHEL?
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Guess comment is (SUSE/openSUSE/Micro)
| (RHEL/Fedora/CoreOS).
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Not RHEL; https://microos.opensuse.org/
| db65edfc7996 wrote:
| 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.
| nix23 wrote:
| Na snapd need's just about 220, so perfect for a 1G raspi, if
| it's the only thing you want to run on.
| cptnapalm wrote:
| That's more than my laptop-as-a-router using Manjaro uses in
| total.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > I highly discourage anyone to use Ubuntu Core as part of
| their solution.
|
| Yup.
|
| The guys at Nitrokey did a nice write-up about this last
| year.[1]
|
| (TL;DR in the end, they chose Debian instead)
|
| [1] https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/nextbox-why-we-decided-
| an...
| hda111 wrote:
| You can't really compare the two wrt IoT. For Debian you need
| an additional OTA update mechanism. Luckily rauc is in the
| Debian repos but you still need to setup everything yourself:
| A/B partitioning etc.
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| I'm surprised they ended up going with a non-immutable
| distro. They say their Debian-derived system is as robust as
| Ubuntu Core, but seemingly immediately contradict this by
| saying they're using apt to manage updates.
| GordonS wrote:
| Aren't they only using it for security updates though?
| mr337 wrote:
| We had the some problem evaluating it for our startup. We were
| planning on using it to deploy ROS in the field and leverage
| the benefits. I was quoted $20k/year to get started and I think
| that also included 10 or 20 devices in the field. Then
| additional costs for that.
|
| There was so many hacks to get it working with ROS since we
| rely on hardware for robotics to communicate with sensors,
| actuators, and network. Basically broke the security model to
| get our application working. We didn't go with it and went
| Debian as well :D
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| That is really ridiculous. I'm sure some companies out there
| will pay it without blinking, but how are the little people
| supposed to evaluate things, heck a former boss at a Fortune
| 500 I know for a fact will say no thank you, and move on. I
| would just use DEB packages and setup a package repository
| myself, what does snap bring that regular debian packaging does
| not?
| moffkalast wrote:
| > what does snap bring that regular debian packaging does not
|
| Snap is like using a python virtualenv, while apt is like
| using global pip. We all know which one of these usually
| results in a broken installation.
|
| Apt debs more often than not rely on some specific version of
| a third party package which becomes a headache when there's
| another package that needs a different version of it. Snap in
| theory solves that, making the deps local to the package
| you're installing.
|
| If I had a dollar for every time I had apt bullshit me with
| "requires package, but it will not be installed" or something
| of the sort I'd probably have something over $20 which isn't
| that much but still infuriatingly high.
| broknbottle wrote:
| As an alternative just package everything up in an AppImage
| and use a AppRun shim script.. Then just deploy the
| AppImage to whatever. The LXD Snap bundles quite a few
| things, there's no reason you couldn't do the same with
| AppImage.
|
| https://xon.sh/appimage.html#building-your-own-xonsh-
| appimag...
|
| https://github.com/niess/python-appimage
| quartesixte wrote:
| >If I had a dollar for every time I had apt bullshit me
| with "requires package, but it will not be installed" or
| something of the sort I'd probably have something over $20
| which isn't that much but still infuriatingly high.
|
| Completely unrelated but the exactness of this turn of
| phrase here delighted me so much and without your
| permission I'd like to steal it for my own use in my daily
| conversations (without credit).
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| It's an adaptation of Doofenshmirtz's line from Phineas
| and Ferb:
|
| > _" Wow! If I had a nickel for every time I was doomed
| by a puppet, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but
| it's weird that it happened twice. Right?"_
| mrighele wrote:
| We are talking about IoT devices where (hopefully) the
| company knows exactly what is installed and what not, so I
| don't think it is a big issue. There may still be conflicts
| to solve, but you can manage them when you prepare the deb
| package, not when you install it
| 2143 wrote:
| > We all know which one of these usually results in a
| broken installation.
|
| And yet they're promoting snap.
|
| Have they given us the ability to stop automatic updates?
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| It looks like Ubuntu Core lets you disable automatic
| updates for snaps: https://ubuntu.com/core/docs/refresh-
| control.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Or the ability to make your own snap store.
| former wrote:
| dljsjr wrote:
| 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.
| yourstruly-br wrote:
| This blog also mentions why Ubuntu Core is a bad choice.
| https://www.nitrokey.com/news/2021/nextbox-why-we-decided-an...
| aulin wrote:
| 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?!
| cbsks wrote:
| Can you configure it easily for a read only root file system?
| synergy20 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > canonical needs to go public and do IPO.
|
| why?
| synergy20 wrote:
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I doubt they'll want to compete in the consumer OS space after
| the ubuntu phone mess.
| barkingcat wrote:
| For embedded / iot usage, one major issue is device support
|
| 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 wrote:
| Smallest thing I've found is a FreeScale SOC running a
| Cortex-A7.
| ngrilly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 I'm planning to give this a spin
| on an EVK that I got from work if I find the time.
| kissiel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Do you think there is any practical use to it instead of
| running just an embedded OS? Driver support maybe?
| kissiel wrote:
| Cortex M* lack MMU, which is necessary for any normal linux
| distro. Cortex M0 and M4 are just beefy microcontrollers.
| n00bface wrote:
| You're correct. I'll revise.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Installation Step 1: An Ubuntu SSO account is required to create
| the first user on an Ubuntu Core installation.
|
| Yeah... no.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| Is Ubuntu Core closed source? If not, can't someone fork it and
| remove this requirement?
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Look for balenaOS (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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| As for money, we have paying customers.
| mdtusz wrote:
| While balena is great for getting up and running quick, you'll
| quickly run into issues when more specific application
| requirements arise, or you need to tighten down security.
|
| It's fantastic for small-scale IoT deployments, but you very
| much need to play nice in their ecosystem, and there's many
| features missing for deployment and version management still,
| and balenaOS and the balena supervisor can often introduce
| breaking quirks, and managing networking is a nightmare. We're
| very happy with how it allowed us to get off the ground and
| running quickly, but are moving to a more "traditional" build
| using yocto on its own moving forwards.
| rgreen wrote:
| For alternatives, I've been running opensuse microos in some test
| deployments and am really happy so far.
| azinman2 wrote:
| 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?
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| 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 -
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| codewithcheese wrote:
| First 10 devices on balena are free, its used by many
| thousands of hobbyists.
|
| For example balenaSound is very popular, for multi-room audio
| with rapsberry pi's https://sound.balenalabs.io/
|
| There is also balenaHub, which hosts many community projects
| and introduces the concept of "open fleets", bring your
| device and join the fleet, instead of managing it yourself
| https://hub.balena.io/fleets
|
| Disclosure: I am an engineer at balena.
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(page generated 2022-06-15 23:02 UTC)