Revision as of 16:41, 7 November 2020

WARNING: Work in progress, the doc. is not complete

Overview

Bering-uClibc is one of the branches of the LEAF (Linux Embedded Appliance Framework) project, delivering on LEAF's ambition to provide a secure, feature-rich, customizable embedded Linux network appliance for use in a variety of network topologies. Although it can be used in other ways, its primary goal is as a Internet gateway, BRAS, router, firewall and wireless access point. The hardware running LEAF in these cases will require a minimum of 2 network interfaces.

Main Features

The key characteristics of Bering-uClibc 7.x are:

• Based on a recent long-term release of the Linux Kernel.
• Easy-to-use
  • USB bootable images of a basic working firewall system
  • Web browser access for quick and easier configuration, the traditional vga or serial display console is not required
  • Hardware detection during boot, necessary modules enabling the hardware will be loaded automatically.
  • Load modules when needed for various Packages - e.g. netfilter modules for shorewall[6].
  • Check for and receive updates with command line utility (upgrade) or Web GUI (webconf) from the Packages repository.

• Targeted to run on industry standard devices even with non-x86 processors.
  

  Bering-uClibc 5.0-prealpha running on an emulated ARM processor
• Designed to perform well on relatively low-specification hardware. In particular:
  • The system runs from an in-memory filesystem. Disk storage is only required for booting and for storing configuration settings.
  • The uClibc-ng C library is used in place of the GNU C Library since uClibc-ng is much smaller in size.
  • Considerable use is made of BusyBox utilities as replacements for larger applications.
• Focussed on providing excellent networking facilities.
• Designed to have high fault tolerance:
  • There are no writes on HDD/flash during work (except saving configurations during maintenance) - so a power failure will not break file system.
  • Corrupted/erased config file, or even 'rm -rf /' isn't a problem - changes are stored permanently only when user requires that, and reboot will restore all as it was before.
  • Enabled by default watchdog, reboot on kernel panic and kernel soft-lockup detection will help to have minimum downtime of router.
  • Backup scripts will help to restore system state on storage failure/operator mistake.

Development History

Bering-uClibc 7.x is basically Bering-uClibc 6.x brought up to date with the latest versions of the main software components and with reworked toolchain.

Bering-uClibc 7.0.0 provides in particular:

• gcc update to 8.3.0
• The Linux kernel has been upgraded to 5,4.x
• The uClibc library has been upgraded to uClibc-ng 1.0.35
• syslog-ng has been replaced by rsyslog

Version 7.0.0 was released in November 2020.

Version Changelog

• Bering-uClibc 7.0.x - Changelog

Known Issues

• Bering-uClibc 7.x - Known Issues

Further Documentation

For further information see:

• Bering-uClibc 7.x - Developer Guide for Developers of new features or new application Packages.