Open Source Summit Europe 2022

Using containers in Embedded Linux devices is becoming more of a reality every day; notably using Docker. These devices are increasingly powerful and the benefits provided by containers are attractive to designers. The ability to easily install, update and replace application payloads makes for a powerful design used in a variety of industries. OpenEmbedded is also widely used for Embedded Linux devices and provides designers complete control over the contents of the system. It provides benefits that are difficult to achieve with traditional containers. These include image size, build reproducibility and license management. In this talk, we will look into generating container payloads using OpenEmbedded rather than the usual route of Dockerfiles and canned images available on repositories such as Docker Hub. We will investigate building images for both bare-metal and container-based execution. We will try to determine how difficult this is to do for a real application and compare it to a similar application built with the traditional Docker approach. To wrap up, we will compare both approaches, specifically in terms of image size, reproducibility, and license management/reporting. We will also discuss why you would want to do this and some use cases where it makes sense.