Taking Alpine to the Edge and beyond with Linux Foundation's Project EVE
Name: Taking Alpine to the Edge and beyond with Linux Foundation's Project EVE Time requested: 50 minutes
Linux Foundation's Project EVE is building EVE-OS: a universal, open Linux-based operating system for distributed edge computing. EVE-OS aims to do for the distributed edge what Android did for mobile by creating an open foundation that simplifies development, orchestration and security of edge computing nodes deployed on-prem and in the field. Supporting Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters and virtual machines, EVE-OS provides a flexible foundation for distributed edge deployments with choice of any hardware, application and cloud. EVE-OS can be deployed on any bare metal hardware (e.g. x86, Arm, GPU) or within a VM to provide consistent system and orchestration services and provides the ability to run applications in a variety of formats.
EVE-OS makes a radical departure from both embedded Linux and traditional Linux distributions: it is based on a Linux kernel, but at its heart is the hypervisor. In order to produce a system like that we had to rely on the most reliable and size-conscious set of building blocks: Alpine Linux and linuxkit. Thus the architecture of EVE is similar to microkernel architectures of yore where all components were highly segregated from each other and a notion of a shared, unified root filesystem tree was not really there.
While EVE-OS is not strictly speaking based on Alpine in the same sense that a postmarketOS is, our experience of leveraging bits and pieces of Alpine in new and unusual ways can still be interesting to the broader Alpine community. In this talk we will cover the overall architecture of EVE-OS, what parts of Alpine it leverages, what parts we're planning on contributing back and how we are now embarking on a RISC-V port of EVE-OS that is going to include getting RISC-V Alpine packages mainstreamed.