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Official project updates
One of our great Nerves maintainers, Frank Hunleth, gave me a bit of an update for this one.
It was discovered that uncompressed .beam files are more efficient for Nerves projects than compressed ones. This is due to them otherwise being compressed again in the firmware image (I believe that's squashfs). So this does a few things, more efficient overall compression, so smaller firmware images and faster boot times due to reducing the number of zlib calls for decompressing those .beam files. Supposedly this will also become the default for Elixir overall.
Erlang and OTP 24.3.x was a bit of fun and there were a couple of fun issues in the first few patch versions. Things are looking good now and I see a ton of system updates coming into this changelog for 24.3.2.
Jon Carstens keeps making the SSH life with Nerves better and you'll see some updates to nerves_ssh that allows adding authorized keys at runtime. He also put a bunch of effort into vintage_net_wireguard which should make using all the cool wireguard stuff easier on your Nerves devices. Looks like early days but quite exciting!
If you track Frank's Twitter you can also see his work on making the GRiSP2 board start fast with Nerves. If you follow the Nerves Project on Twitter you'll find out that Jon is still giving out Nerves Tips. And Connor is trying Nerves on new hardware.
On to the changelogs, we got a ton of system updates to cover:
- Bug fix
- Fix Erlang compiler check so that Erlang/OTP 24.3 does not trigger an error when building projects.
- Package updates
- Erlang/OTP 24.3.2. See Erlang/OTP 24.3.1 and Erlang/OTP 24.3 for other changes.
Systems updated, with some extra on the BBB at the end:
- nerves_system_osd32mp1, v0.9.3
- nerves_system_x86_64, v1.18.3
- nerves_system_vultr, v0.15.3
- nerves_system_rpi4, v1.18.3
- nerves_system_rpi3a, v1.18.3
- nerves_system_rpi3, v1.18.3
- nerves_system_rpi2, v1.18.3
- nerves_system_rpi, v1.18.3
- nerves_system_rpi0, v1.18.3
This is mostly a Buildroot and Erlang bug and security fix release. It should be a low risk upgrade from the previous release.
Changes
- Update the U-Boot bootloader to the 2021.10 release and pull in latest upstream Beaglebone patch set. This adds support for the BBG Gateway. Since the bootloader isn’t normally updated, you’ll need to re-flash the MicroSD card to get this update. If your device already works, then there’s no reason to do this.
Updated dependencies
- nerves_system_br v1.18.5
- U-Boot 2021.10
- Potentially Breaking Changes
- Bump minimums to Elixir >= 1.10 / OTP >= 23
- Changes
- Save shell history on first boot. Previously, Erlang would open up the shell history file before the data partition was formatted and wouldn’t retry. Nerves.Runtime now resets shell history so that it retries.
- Call modprobe to load kernel modules to C to reduce boot time.
NervesSSH now requires Elixir >= 1.10 and OTP >=23
- New features
- Support for adding authorized public keys at runtime
- Authorized public keys are also saved/read from authorized_keys file
- Support for adding user credentials at runtime
- Server host key is now generated on device if missing rather than relying on hard-coded host key provided by this lib. This should not be a breaking change, though you may be prompted to trust the new host key if StrictHostKeyChecking yes is set in your ~/.ssh/config
- Updates
- Various small improvements for the GRiSP 2
- Add support for the Beaglebone Green Gateway (bbb target)
- Update to Erlang 24.2.2
Updates:
- Various small improvements for the GRiSP 2
- Add support for the Beaglebone Green Gateway (bbb target)
- Update to Erlang 24.2.2
- Improvements
- Skip printing MOTD if Nerves.Runtime isn’t started. The previous behavior was to try to start Nerves.Runtime. The scenario this mostly affects is printing the MOTD to the serial console right after Elixir loads, but before Nerves.Runtime and the rest. Besides printing a slightly confusing MOTD of a partially started system, it also could reorder OTP application from the boot script.
- Changed
- Increase wpa_supplicant timeout from 1 second to 4 seconds. Normally responses come in quickly. On GRiSP 2, initialization takes >1 second. This prevents an unnecessary wpa_supplicant restart and improves boot time.
- Increase wpa_supplicant timeout from 1 second to 4 seconds. Normally responses come in quickly. On GRiSP 2, initialization takes >1 second. This prevents an unnecessary wpa_supplicant restart and improves boot time.
- Changes
- Support one_dhcpd v2.0.0 - OneDHCPD 2.0 removes functions that VintageNetDirect didn’t use.
- Support one_dhcpd v2.0.0 - OneDHCPD 2.0 removes functions that VintageNetDirect didn’t use.
Supporting the Nerves project
We want to encourage everyone to contribute in whatever way works for them. Here are some ways we currently recommend:
- Write or port a new hardware library and include it in the Elixir Circuits collection.
- Give money to the project via Open Collective.
- Get in touch about taking over maintenance duties for some libraries, we might be able to provide you hardware.
- Apply for an EEF stipend on something Nerves-related and build it. We can help if you have questions about this.
- Send corrections or improvements for documentation wherever it fails to help you.
- Write about Nerves, give talks about Nerves. Make videos about Nerves. It is all good.
Finally, if you have questions about the newsletter or want to suggest something you can simply respond to this email it will go directly to me, Lars, who edits this thing. Let me know what you think.
- Lars, Underjord.io
