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Linux Kernel & Core Packages

Super-long-term maintenance

The Civil Infrastructure Platform project (CIP) provides Super-Long-Term Stable (SLTS) kernels with a maintenance period of ten years. This is done in close collaboration with the Linux kernel community.

The SLTS kernels start off from the standard LTS kernels, prolonging their life-time, but also permitting certain backports of hardware support that was accepted upstream only later. The scope of the kernel support (subsystems, drivers, features) is defined by the CIP members together with the CIP kernel maintainers. The CIP kernel maintainers and contributors track the queue of kernel fixes targeting active LTS kernels, support with review and testing, and then select required patches for backport to STLS kernels.

Repositories:

Further Resources:

Core Packages

CIP supports a set of core packages for a minimal system which are also maintained along with the kernels. The CIP Core Working Group defines such packages [1] based on actual demands in fields, and manages tools and infrastructure to build, test, and maintain systems that consist of the packages. CIP selects Debian GNU/Linux as the base Linux distribution to pick packages up, and extends the work of Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended LTS (ELTS) so that the respective packages will be maintained for 10 years at least.

The CIP Core Working Group also provides tools [2] to build and test reference file system images made of the core packages. The reference images themselves are regularly tested on CIP reference hardware using the CIP infrastructure provided by the Testing Working Group, and also used as the development environment for CIP kernel. Additionally, the reference image works as the foundation for CIP developers (e.g. Security and Software Updates Working Groups) to enhance, test, and evaluate new features.

Testing

Testing is an important part of software development and maintenance for CIP. The project utilises GitLab CI/CD to drive automated code verification for the CIP SLTS kernel, CIP Core and other CIP software. For on-device testing, a distributed LAVA instance is used.

CIP is a member of the KernelCI Linux Foundation project where we collaborate to further enhance Linux kernel testing for CIP and the wider Open Source community.

Real-Time Support

CIP is gold member of and closely collaborates with the RT Linux project to regularity provide preempt-RT versions of the CIP kernel.

Repository

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