Beaglebone Black Debian Linux

[Lovell, James A [US] (MS)]

Hello,

 

I’m trying to get some information on the Beaglebone Debian port versus the Debian armhf and armel ports.  Can you help me answer the following questions?

1.       Is a synopsis available of the differences between the Beaglebone Debian port and the mainline Debian ports for the same architecture?

2.       Does Beaglebone Debian follow the Debian product lifecycle? 

3.       Will the same security bulletins, patches, and releases from https://security.debian.org be applicable to Beaglebone Debian?  If so, does Beaglebone defer to the Debian package trees for actual package updates?

We’re currently working an embedded engineering project that utilizes the TI AM335x SoC architecture, and I’ve been having a bit of trouble understanding how the Beaglebone Black Debian lifecycle works.  Any information you can provide would be a great help.

 

James Lovell, CISSP

Principle Cyber Architect

C-RAM Data Analysis Lab Systems Administrator

C-RAM Cybersecurity and Data Analysis (CDA)

Northrop Grumman Mission Systems

5000 Bradford Drive, Suite 100, Huntsville, AL 35805

Office: (256) 327-6377 | Mobile: (256) 655-0504

James....@ngc.com

 

[Robert Nelson]

On Wed, Jul 17, 2019 at 2:07 PM Lovell, James A [US] (MS)
<James....@ngc.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>
>
> I’m trying to get some information on the Beaglebone Debian port versus the Debian armhf and armel ports. Can you help me answer the following questions?

Debian almost dropped "armel" during Buster development cycle, it days
going forward is very limited..

> 1. Is a synopsis available of the differences between the Beaglebone Debian port and the mainline Debian ports for the same architecture?

The BeagleBone Debian Images is not a port of Debian.. Instead, we
start with a pure Debian install, then add our Custom Kernel, Custom
u-boot and any packages either not in Debian, or backported from
Stable+1..

> 2. Does Beaglebone Debian follow the Debian product lifecycle?

Sure, let's look at Debian's product lifecycle:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianReleases

Version Code name Release date End of life date EOL LTS EOL ELTS

10 Buster 2019-07-06 ~2022
9 Stretch 2017-06-17 ~2020 ~2022
8 Jessie 2015-04-25 2018-06-17 ~2020-06-30

Then lets look at this email i sent out, detailing my plan for Jessie
and Stretch:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/beagleboard/1J7alzYGum4/pjjrPYo0DQAJ

>
> 3. Will the same security bulletins, patches, and releases from https://security.debian.org be applicable to Beaglebone Debian? If so, does Beaglebone defer to the Debian package trees for actual package updates?

This can be easily explained by looking at our /etc/apt/sources.list

debian@BeagleBoard-X15:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian buster main contrib non-free

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib non-free

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main contrib non-free
#deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian-security buster/updates main
contrib non-free

#Kernel source (repos.rcn-ee.com) :
https://github.com/RobertCNelson/linux-stable-rcn-ee
#
#git clone https://github.com/RobertCNelson/linux-stable-rcn-ee
#cd ./linux-stable-rcn-ee
#git checkout `uname -r` -b tmp
#
deb [arch=armhf] http://repos.rcn-ee.com/debian/ buster main
#deb-src [arch=armhf] http://repos.rcn-ee.com/debian/ buster main

> We’re currently working an embedded engineering project that utilizes the TI AM335x SoC architecture, and I’ve been having a bit of trouble understanding how the Beaglebone Black Debian lifecycle works. Any information you can provide would be a great help.

Regards,


--
Robert Nelson
https://rcn-ee.com/

[Lovell, James A [US] (MS)]

Robert,

Excellent information and succinct. Thank you for this. This gives me great assurance of the supportability and maintainability of the Beaglebone Black Debian image as an OS baseline. You pretty much confirmed what I hoped was the case.


Regards,

James Lovell, CISSP
Principle Cyber Architect
C-RAM Data Analysis Lab Systems Administrator
C-RAM Cybersecurity and Data Analysis (CDA)
Northrop Grumman Mission Systems
5000 Bradford Drive, Suite 100, Huntsville, AL 35805
Office: (256) 327-6377 | Mobile: (256) 655-0504
James....@ngc.com