3 posts tagged with "ota"

Today, with the release of Rugix Ctrl 1.1, we are introducing Rugix Apps, a new mechanism for deploying and managing application workloads on embedded Linux devices.

Embedded devices typically run diverse application workloads on top of their base system: containerized services, local HMIs, data pipelines, or inference models. These workloads change more frequently than the OS, and different devices in a fleet often need different combinations of them. Managing their lifecycle, versioning, rollback, crash recovery, and persistent state, has traditionally been left as an exercise for the integrator. Rugix Apps makes it a first-class capability of Rugix Ctrl, building upon Rugix's best-in-class delta update capabilities, security properties, and reliability.

Rugix Apps works standalone: you do not need Rugix Bakery, Rugix's state management, or even Rugix system updates to use it. Any Linux device with Rugix Ctrl installed can deploy and manage application workloads.

In this article, we discuss the challenges of deploying and managing application workloads on embedded Linux devices, show how Rugix Apps addresses those challenges, and walk through a concrete example using Docker Compose.

If you are building an embedded Linux product, one of the engineering decisions you face is which on-device update engine to use. This decision has lasting implications: embedded devices routinely have lifecycles of 5 to 15 years, and whichever update mechanism you choose today will determine how you ship software to devices already in the field for the entire duration of that lifecycle.

Fortunately, the landscape of open-source OTA update engines for embedded Linux has matured significantly over the past decade. Where teams once wrote bespoke shell scripts to flash partitions, there are now several ready-made open-source tools available to choose from. These tools differ in philosophy, architecture, features, and the trade-offs they make. In this article, we survey and compare the major open-source OTA update engines for embedded Linux, examine the fundamental techniques and strategies they employ, and provide a technically grounded comparison.

There is a growing trend in the embedded Linux space: vendors are coupling their cloud platforms with their own on-device OTA update mechanisms. On the surface, this makes sense. You get a single vendor, a single integration, a single bill. But if you look a few years ahead, this coupling comes at a cost that is easy to underestimate.