Using GNOME OS on real hardware

Valentin David

GUADEC 2020
July 22nd

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 1 / 27

Table of Contents

1 What is GNOME OS?

2 ARM 64

3 x86 64

4 Experience using GNOME OS

5 How to get it

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 2 / 27

What is GNOME OS?

Bootable image deliverable of GNOME releases and continous builds

Application developers: test their applications before release

Release process itself
UX testing
Hardware testing

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 3 / 27

With some ideas going further

Preinstalled on hardware. A bright future for GNOME Juan José Sánchez and Xan López
(GUADEC 2012)

GNOME is not a platform until it is not also an OS. See There is No “Linux” Platform Tobias
Bernard and Jordan Petridis (LAS 2019)

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 4 / 27

First implementation: GNOME Continuous

Initiated by Colin Walters

Both a tool to build, and the manifest describing the modules
Based on top of an image built with Yocto
Updates with OSTree (atomic updates). Nice!

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 5 / 27

Many manifests, many builds

Release using JHBuild

Flatpak’s GNOME SDK built with Flatpak Builder
GNOME Continuous

Replaced by BuildStream and GNOME Build Metadata

GNOME Build Strategies and BuildStream Tristan Van Berkom (GUADEC 2017)
Migrating from JHBuild to BuildStream Michael Catanzaro (GUADEC 2018)
GNOME and Buildstream, two (three?) years later Abderrahim Kitouni (2020), see him
on Friday 24th, 15:30 UTC

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 6 / 27

What is in GNOME OS?

Boots on UEFI using systemd-boot

Initramfs is generated with dracut
Plymouth (graphical boot) with bgrt theme.
Systemd init (also in initramfs)
GNOME core
Flatpak for the other applications
Wayland + XWayland
Mesa drivers
Starts with GNOME Initial Setup
Root partition resized at first boot
OSTree atomic update, with eos-udpater and GNOME Software

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 7 / 27

Table of Contents

1 What is GNOME OS?

2 ARM 64

3 x86 64

4 Experience using GNOME OS

5 How to get it

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 8 / 27

ARM boards tested

Pinebook Pro (laptop)

Rock 64

Raspberry Pi 4 (by Tom Pollard)

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 9 / 27

UEFI on ARM?

Booting ARM boards is awful. Weird bootloaders.

Rarely support UEFI out of the box. But some do.

When EDK II is not ported, U-Boot can be used to boot UEFI.

Bootloader is firmware, and is not part of OSTree.

Each board has a different initial image
However the OSTree repository can be the same

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 10 / 27

The device tree mess

Device trees come with the kernel. They are specific to hardware.
ACPI/SMBIOS comes from hardware on x86 64
OSTree does not really properly support
Thanksfully UEFI provides device tree
How to update the device tree? fwupd?

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 11 / 27

Non upstream kernels

Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi 4: kernel not upstreamed

Different kernel =⇒ different OSTree

We should not support board with no upstream Linux support

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 12 / 27

How well does it run?

Range of ARM products is wide. From microcontrollers to powerful workstations

Pinebook Pro (laptop), Rock 64, Raspberry Pi 4 are cheap. But runs well.
Raspberry Pi 3 A had too little memory: 512MB. Most of it went to video memory
All had some video acceleration

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 13 / 27

Table of Contents

1 What is GNOME OS?

2 ARM 64

3 x86 64

4 Experience using GNOME OS

5 How to get it

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Running all my desktops/latops on GNOME OS
I do not use those aarch64 devices everyday. So...

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 15 / 27

Installer on ISO

First, we need and installer

An ISO booting image with Endless OS installer as a proof of context
Endless OS installer is based on GNOME Initial Setup

Note: not merged yet

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 16 / 27

Table of Contents

1 What is GNOME OS?

2 ARM 64

3 x86 64

4 Experience using GNOME OS

5 How to get it

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 17 / 27

Does GNOME core work?

Most core applications worked.

Fixed
Builder: needed Flatpak Builder
Boxes: libvirt was missing many dependencies
Photos, Music: Tracker broken

Still broken
Orca not working (does it work on Wayland?)
Web and Videos are missing h264 codec
Web missing microphone/webcam support

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 18 / 27

Other things that were fixed

Power management: was missing integration

Printing: was missing lots of dependencies. Only tested postscript printers. Please test.

Flatpak portals for GTK+ were missing

Hardware:
bluetooth
wifi
sound, microphones
touchscreens, touchpads
webcams

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 19 / 27

Development

To develop GNOME OS on GNOME OS, I needed BuildStream.

So BuildStream on Flatpak? Yes. But bad user experience.

objdump? gdb? valgrind? Flatpak too.

git? flatpak-builder? Dependencies of GNOME Builder.

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 20 / 27

Solution: dual trees

Two trees:
For users (Core minus GNOME Builder)
GNOME Builder + SDK (as in Flatpak)
(Like GNOME Continuous “runtime” and “debug-devel”)

What about debuginfo? We should use debuginfod.

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 21 / 27

Gaming

Steam devices udev files, Gamemode

VR works, but Wayland does not yet have drm lease.

Still missing fan and voltage control, cpu frequency, and sensor monitoring

I have used AMD and Intel graphics. What about NVidia proprietary drivers?
We use glvnd
How to deploy and EGL/vulkan/opencl backends?

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 22 / 27

How did I make slides?

Built TeXLive with BuildStream and run in a BuildStream shell.

Maybe using podman, or other OCI container system would have been easier.

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 23 / 27

One last thing

CCID support: sign and login with a hardware key

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 24 / 27

Table of Contents

1 What is GNOME OS?

2 ARM 64

3 x86 64

4 Experience using GNOME OS

5 How to get it

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 25 / 27

Should I use it?

Still in development, and needs documentation.

As a virtual machine for testing: yes, soon.

On hardware? Not yet. Unless your point is to contribute into making it work on hardware.

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 26 / 27

How to get it

OSTree repository begin set up

Master build available on GNOME Build Metadata

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta

Ask #gnome-os on GIMPNet

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 27 / 27

Aknowledgements

Special thanks to Abderrahim Kitouni and the rest of the release team.

This work was sponsored by:

Valentin David ( ) GNOME OS on hardware GUADEC 2020 28 / 27