View Source Changelog

This project does NOT follow semantic versioning. The version increases as follows:

  1. Major version updates are breaking updates to the build infrastructure. These should be very rare.
  2. Minor version updates are made for every major Buildroot release. This may also include Erlang/OTP and Linux kernel updates. These are made four times a year shortly after the Buildroot releases.
  3. Patch version updates are made for Buildroot minor releases, Erlang/OTP releases, and Linux kernel updates. They're also made to fix bugs and add features to the build infrastructure.

v2.21.0

This is a major Buildroot and Linux update. If you use circuits_gpio, it is critical to update to 1.2.0 or later to get a workaround for GPIO indices changing.

Please see the nerves_system_br v1.26.0 release notes for upgrade instructions if you've forked this system.

v2.20.2

This is a security/bug fix update.

v2.20.1

This fixes a regression where the forced circuits_gpio dependency update broke compilation. This removes the optional dependency, but be sure to see the note below about the GPIOs being remapped and Circuits.GPIO v1.2.0 containing a workaround.

v2.20.0

This is a major Buildroot, toolchain, and Linux kernel update.

Please see nerves_system_br v1.25.0 release notes for upgrade instructions if you've forked this system.

The Linux kernel update from 5.10 to 6.1 has a side effect of renumbering GPIOs. Circuits.GPIO v1.2 accounts for this so programs don't need to change that use it. See https://github.com/elixir-circuits/circuits_gpio/pull/153 for more information. This system has an optional dependency on Circuits.GPIO to force the upgrade.

v2.19.1

This is a security/bug fix update.

v2.19.0

This is a Buildroot version update that appears to mostly contain bug and security fixes. It should be a low risk upgrade from v2.18.2.

v2.18.2

v2.18.1

This is a bug and security fix update. It should be a low risk upgrade.

v2.18.0

This is a major update that brings in Erlang/OTP 26, Buildroot 2023.02.2 and Linux 5.10.162.

v2.17.2

This is a bug and security fix update. It should be a low risk upgrade.

v2.17.1

This is a bug fix and Erlang version bump from 25.2 to 25.2.3. It should be a low risk upgrade.

v2.17.0

This is a Buildroot version update that appears to mostly contain bug and security fixes. It should be a low risk upgrade.

v2.16.2

  • Changes

    • Two Buildroot patch updates and an Erlang minor version update
    • Nerves Heart v2.0 is now included. Nerves Heart connects the Erlang runtime to a hardware watchdog. v2.0 has numerous updates to improve information that you can get and also has more safeguards to avoid conditions that could cause a device to hang forever.
  • Updated dependencies

v2.16.1

v2.16.0

v2.15.3

v2.15.2

v2.15.1

This release reverts the upgrade to Linux 5.15.44. The Linux kernel is now at 5.10.120. This fixes an issue where the numbering of /dev/gpiochipN changed. All code that identified GPIOs by number broke (pretty much everything using Circuits.GPIO).

v2.15.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2022.05, Linux 5.15.44 (from Linux 5.10) and uses GCC 11.3 (from GCC 10.3). The Linux kernel upgrade could introduce a regression, so please verify hardware-specific functionality in your firmware.

v2.14.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2022.02.1 and OTP 25.0. While this should be an easy update for most projects, many programs have been updated. Please review the changes in the updated dependencies for details.

v2.13.4

  • Changes

    • Fix USB/Ethernet support on the BeagleBone Green Gateway
    • Fix regression in v2.13.3 for loading device tree overlays
    • Pull in upstream Linux SquashFS patch to improve file system performance
  • Updated dependencies

v2.13.3

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

v2.13.2

This is a Buildroot and Erlang bug fix release that also adds support for additional AM335x-based boards. It should be a low risk upgrade from the previous release.

  • Updated dependencies

  • Changes

    • Support the Beaglebone Blue (robotics-focused Beaglebone) and the AM3358 EVM Starter Kit (dual Ethernet)
    • Adjust PRU parameters to match TI configs. If you're using the PRUs, please verify that the changes do not break your code.
    • Reduce kernel timers from 250 Hz to 100 Hz resolution. 100 Hz is the value used by the TI source and the value used by other official Nerves systems.
    • When deriving the board serial number, fail back to the /proc/cpuinfo contents before using the wired Ethernet MAC.
    • Specify CPU-specific flags when compiling NIFs and ports. This fixes an issue where some optimizations could not be enabled in NIFs even though it should be possible to have them. E.g., ARM NEON support for CPUs that have it.
    • Build the Wireguard kernel driver. This is a small device driver that enables a number of VPN-based use cases.

v2.13.1

  • Updated dependencies

  • Changes

    • Programs that use OpenMP will run now. The OpenMP shared library (libgomp.so) was supplied by the toolchain, but not copied.

v2.13.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2021.11, OTP 24.2, and Linux 5.10.64. If you have made a custom system, please review the nerves_system_br release notes. Also, the previous release used Linux 5.4, so double check your Linux configuration to make sure that the update to Linux 5.10.64 doesn't disable something unexpected.

  • Updated dependencies

  • Improvements

    • Support for the dl.nerves-project.org backup site. Due to a GitHub outage in November, there was a 2 day period of failing builds since some packages could not be downloaded. We implemented the backup site to prevent this in the future. This update is in the nerves_defconfig.
    • Use new build ORB on CircleCI. This ORB will shorten build times to fit in CircleCI's new free tier limits. Please update if building your own systems.

v2.12.3

v2.12.2

v2.12.1

This is a security/bug fix patch release. It should be safe to update for everyone.

v2.12.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2021.08 and OTP 24.1. If you have made a custom system off this one, please review the nerves_system_br v1.17.0 release notes.

v2.11.2

This release updates Erlang/OTP from 24.0.3 to 24.0.5 and Buildroot from 2021.05 to 2021.05.1. Both of these are security/bug fix updates. This is expected to be a safe upgrade from v1.16.1 for all users.

  • Updated dependencies

  • Improvements

    • Beta support for using a runtime.exs script for runtime configuration.
    • Added a provision task to the fwup.config to enable re-provisioning a MicroSD card without changing its contents.
    • Adds a default /etc/sysctl.conf that enables use of ICMP in Erlang. This requires nerves_runtime v0.11.5 or later to automatically load the sysctl variables. With it using :gen_udp to send/receive ICMP will "just work". It also makes it easier to add other sysctl variables if needed.

v2.11.1

This release updates Nerves Toolchains to v1.4.3 and OTP 24.0.3. It should be safe for everyone to apply.

v2.11.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2021.05 and OTP 24.0.2. If you have made a custom system off this one, please review the nerves_system_br v1.16.0 release notes.

  • Updated dependencies

  • Improvements

    • This release now contains debug symbols and includes the Build-ID in the ELF headers. This makes it easier to get stack traces from C programs. As before, the Nerves tooling strips all symbols from firmware images, so this won't make programs bigger.
    • Enable compile-time wpa_supplicant options to support WPA3, mesh networking, WPS and autoscan.

v2.10.1

This is a security/bug fix release that updates to Buildroot 2021.02.1 and OTP 23.3.1. It should be safe for everyone to apply.

v2.10.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2021.02 and OTP 23.2.7. If you have made a custom system off this one, please review the nerves_system_br v1.15.0 release notes.

The Nerves toolchain has also been updated to v1.4.2. This brings in Linux 4.14 headers to enable use of cdev and eBPF. This won't affect most users.

v2.9.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2020.11.2, GCC 10.2 and OTP 23.2.4.

When migrating custom systems based, please be aware of the following important changes:

  • There's a new getrandom syscall that is made early in BEAM startup. This has the potential to block the BEAM before Nerves can start rngd to provide entropy. We have not seen this issue here, but have updated erlinit.config for the time being as a precaution.

  • The GCC 10.2.0 toolchain has a different name that calls out "nerves" as the vendor and the naming is now more consistent with other toolchain providers.

  • Experimental support for tooling that requires more information about the target has been added. The initial support focuses on zigler.

  • Updated dependencies

v2.8.3

This is a bug fix release with no major changes.

v2.8.2

This release includes a patch release update to Buildroot 2020.08.2.

v2.8.1

The main change in this release is to bump the Linux kernel to 5.4. If you have based a custom system off of this one, please inspect the linux-5.4.defconfig for changes. There were only a few changes, but if you are modifying the kernel configuration, please review first.

v2.8.0

This release updates to Buildroot 2020.08 and OTP 23.1.1.

v2.7.2

This release updates to Buildroot 2020.05.1 and OTP 23.0.3 which are both bug fix releases.

  • Updated dependencies

  • New features

    • The /data directory now exists for storing application-specific data. It is currently a symlink to /root. Using /data will eventually be encouraged over /root even though currently there is no advantage. This change makes it possible to start migrating paths in applications and libraries.
  • Fixes

    • Fixed old references to the -Os compiler flag. All C/C++ code will default to using -O2 now.

v2.7.1

  • Fixes
    • Remove nerves_system_linter from hex package. This fixes mix dependency errors in projects that reference systems with different nerves_system_linter dependency specs.

v2.7.0

This release updates the system to use Buildroot 2020.05 and Erlang/OTP 23. Please see the respective release notes for updates and deprecations in both projects for changes that may affect your application.

  • New features

    • Enable WiFi mesh support in the 802.11 stack
    • NervesKey support (see README.md for device tree overlay information)
  • Updated dependencies

v2.6.2

v2.6.1

  • Updated dependencies
    • nerves_system_br v1.11.2
    • Erlang 22.3.1
    • erlinit 1.7.0 - tty initialization support
    • fwup 1.6.0 - xdelta3/VCDIFF patch support
    • Enable unixodbc so that Erlang's odbc application can be used in projects

v2.6.0

This release updates Buildroot to 2020.02 and upgrades gcc from 8.3 to 9.2. While this is a minor version bump due to the Buildroot release update, barring advanced usage of Nerves, this is a straightforward update from v2.5.2.

v2.5.2

  • Fixes

    • This fixes a regression on OSX where the USB gadget Ethernet would incorrectly try to go into RNDIS mode and not work. Gadget Ethernet works with this fix on Linux and OSX. It also works on Windows with a driver installed. See the README.md for details.
    • The USB driver uses PIO mode again. It had mistakenly been switched to DMA mode. DMA mode works for a lot of USB devices, but not all and it's not what Debian does. See PR 138 for more information.
  • Updated dependencies

v2.5.1

This release changes the behavior of the gadget port. The gadget driver has been changed to use g_ether. This provides a more stable network connection at the expense of the virtual serial port.

  • Enhancements

    • Set expand=true on the application data partition. This will only take effect for users running the complete task, fwup will not expand application data partitions that exist during upgrade tasks.
    • linux: swap the cdc composite gadget for g_ether
  • Updated dependencies

v2.5.0

This release updates Buildroot to 2019.11 with security and bug fix updates across Linux packages. Enables dnsd, udhcpd and ifconfig in the default Busybox configuration to support vintage_net and vintage_net_wizard. See the nerves_system_br notes for details.

v2.4.2

This release updates Buildroot to 2019.08.2 with security and bug fix updates across Linux packages. See the nerves_system_br notes for details. Erlang/OTP is now at 22.1.7.

This release also enables the pinmux helper for changing the pin settings on the PocketBeagle and other boards.

For example:

iex> cat "/sys/devices/platform/ocp/ocp:P2_30_pinmux/state"
default
iex> File.write("/sys/devices/platform/ocp/ocp:P2_30_pinmux/state", "spi_cs")
:ok

For the PocketBeagle, see https://github.com/beagleboard/linux/blob/4.19/arch/arm/boot/dts/am335x-pocketbeagle.dts#L1186

v2.4.1

This release pulls in security and bug fix updates from nerves_system_br. Erlang/OTP is now at 22.1.1.

  • Updated dependencies
    • nerves_system_br v1.9.4
    • bborg-overlays - update to latest to pull in device tree overlay fixes and additions from upstream

v2.4.0

This release updates Buildroot to 2019.08 with security and bug fix updates across Linux packages. See the nerves_system_br notes for details.

  • Updated dependencies

  • Enhancements

    • Support a variety of USB->UART adapters so more devices work out-of-the-box

v2.3.2

This release fixes an issue where the MAC address for the wired Ethernet port on many BeagleBone-based boards was not being set. Unfortunately, the fix is with the U-Boot bootloader configuration and this is not updated when applying updates over-the-air. Fresh firmware installs will apply the fix, so if you're burning MicroSD cards, you're fine. It is possible to fix the wired Ethernet MAC address issue in the field if necessary. Please post to our support channels if you need to do this and are not sure.

v2.3.1

  • Enhancements

    • Enable source-based routing in the Linux kernel to support vintage_net
    • Enable pstore, an in-memory buffer that can capture logs, kernel oops and other information when unexpected reboots. The buffer can be recovered on the next boot where it can be inspected.
  • Updated dependencies

v2.3.0

This release

This release updates Erlang to OTP 22 and gcc from version 7.3.0 to 8.3.0. See the nerves_system_br and toolchain release notes for more information.

v2.2.2

  • Bux fixes
    • Add TAR option --no-same-owner to fix errors when untarring artifacts as the root user.
  • Updated dependencies

v2.2.1

  • Bug fixes

    • Re-enabled Ralink rt2800usb WiFi driver.
  • Improvements

    • Bump C compiler options to -O2 from -Os. This provides a small, but measurable performance improvement (500ms at boot in a trivial project tested on nerves_system_rpi0).
    • Added r8712u.ko WiFi driver.
  • Updated dependencies

v2.2.0

v2.1.3

v2.1.2

v2.1.1

  • Updated dependencies

    • nerves_system_br v1.6.5
    • Erlang 21.2.2
    • boardid 1.5.2
    • erlinit 1.4.9
    • OpenSSL 1.1.1a
    • Linux 4.19.10 with the Beagleboard Debian kernel patches
  • Enhancements

    • Moved boardid config from inside erlinit.config to /etc/boardid.config

v2.1.0

This pulls in a pending patch in Buildroot to update the version of OpenSSL from 1.0.2 to 1.1.0h. This fixes what appears to be issues with Erlang using OpenSSL engines. It also enables Erlang crypto algorithms such as ed25519 that have been added in recent Erlang releases.

v2.0.0

v2.0.0-rc.0

This is a backwards incompatible update to nerves_system_bbb. Over-the-air updates to existing devices will not work. If you're a production user of nerves_system_bbb, please consider supporting efforts to maintain a v1.4.0 branch.

The v2.0.0 support adds the following:

  1. Device tree overlays are applied by U-Boot now. Support in Nerves is nearly identical to Beagleboard.org's Debian distribution. This fixes significant issues in v1.4.0 and before ever since upstream moved from loading device tree overlays in Linux to U-Boot.
  2. Support for automatic failback of bad new builds. If enabled, your Nerves application will need to mark a software update as good (for example, it can contact a server) or else the next reboot will revert.
  3. The application partition uses F2FS rather than EXT4. This noticeably improves startup time on the first boot and has some less obvious advantages from being a Flash-aware file system.
  4. The hardware watchdog is enabled at boot. Your application must enable heart now.
  5. The U-Boot environment was increased in size to 128 KB. This was required for the new device tree overlay support and unfortunately makes migrating devices from v1.4.0 not possible without significant work.

v1.4.0

This release contains various updates to provisioning variables and data.

Host requirements

Building firmware using this system requires fwup to be updated on your host computer to at least v1.2.5. The target minimum version requirement has not changed from 0.15.0.

Serial numbers

Device serial numbers are now set using NERVES_SERIAL_NUMBER instead of SERIAL_NUMBER. This is to reduce ambiguity on the source of the serial by name spacing it along side other Nerves variables. The U-Boot environment key has also changed from serial_number to nerves_serial_number. The erlinit.config has been updated to provide backwards compatibility for setting the hostname from the serial number by checking for nerves_serial_number and falling back to serial_number.

Custom provisioning

Provisioning data is applied at the time of calling the fwup task complete. The complete task is executed when writing the firmware to the target disk. During this time, fwup will include the contents of a provisioning file located at ${NERVES_SYSTEM}/images/fwup_include/provisioning.conf. By default, this file only sets nerves_serial_number. You can add additional provisioning data by overriding the location of this file to include your own by setting the environment variable NERVES_PROVISIONING. If you override this variable you will be responsible for also setting nerves_serial_number.

v1.3.0

This release upgrades gcc from version 6.3.0 to 7.3.0. See the toolchain release notes for more information.

Switch to using busybox.fragment for easier maintainance.

v1.2.1

v1.2.0

This release updates Erlang to OTP 21.0

v1.1.1

This release fixes some issues and adds firmware UUID support. This support can be used to unambiguously know what's running on a device.

  • Updated dependencies

  • Bug fixes

    • Empty serial numbers stored in the U-Boot environment would be used instead of reverting to devices IDs built into the CPU or board.
    • It wasn't possible to enable QtWebEngine (needed for kiosk apps)

v1.1.0

This release adds official support for provisioning serial numbers to devices. Other information can be provisioned in a similar manner. See the README.md for details.

Buildroot was also updated to 2018.05. Be sure to review the nerves_system_br link for the changes in the embedded Linux components.

  • Updated dependencies

  • New features

    • More wpa-supplicant features were enabled to support more WiFi use-cases

v1.0.0

This release is nearly identical to rc.1 except with the deps bump to 1.0 and documentation/comment updates.

v1.0.0-rc.1

This release contains updates to Erlang and heart from nerves_system_br. It also has a configuration change to the Linux kernel that enables scaling the processor frequency based on workload. This makes the process run much cooler while still allowing it to increase frequency for heavy computations.

Note that the trivial .fw files are no longer created by CI scripts. If you've forked this project and are building systems using CI, make sure to update your publish scripts.

v1.0.0-rc.0

v0.20.0

v0.19.1

  • Updated dependencies
    • nerves_system_br v0.16.3 This fixes the call to otp_build so that it always uses Buildroot's version the autoconf tools.

v0.19.0

  • Updated dependencies

  • Enhancements

    • Reboot automatically if Erlang VM exits - This is consistent with other Nerves systems. See rootfs_overlay/etc/erlinit.config if undesired.

    • Start running nerves_system_linter to check for configuration errors.

    • Automount the boot partition readonly at /boot

    • Support for reverting firmware.

      See Reverting Firmware for more info on reverting firmware.

      See fwup-revert.conf for more information on how fwup handles reverting.

v0.18.0

  • Updated dependencies

  • Enhancements

    • Support for nerves 0.8. Moves nerves.exs into mix.exs
    • Support for pocketbeagle
  • Bug Fixes

    • Clear out the wl18xx MAC address field This will trigger the WiLink device driver to use the MAC address that TI programmed into the module rather than 00:00:de:ad:be:ef.

v0.17.1

v0.17.0

This release changes the default IEx prompt output from the debug UART pins to a virtual serial port on the USB OTG connector. This release also enables a virtual Ethernet interface on the same USB interface for software updates. See the nerves_init_gadget project for initialization code.

v0.16.1

  • Updated dependencies
    • nerves_system_br v0.13.7

v0.16.0

This release contains an updated toolchain with Linux 4.1 Headers. You will have to clean and compile any c/c++ code in your project and dependencies. Failure to do so will result in an error when producing firmware.

  • nerves_system_br v0.13.5

    • fwup 0.15.4
  • Nerves toolchain v0.11.0

v0.15.0

  • nerves_system_br v0.13.3

    • erlinit 1.1.4
  • New features

    • Firmware updates verify that they're updating the right target. If the target doesn't say that it's an bbb through the firmware metadata, the update will fail.
    • Added meta-misc and meta-vcs-identifier to the fwup.conf metadata for use by users and for the regression test framework
    • Use String.trim instead of String.strip to silence Elixir 1.5 warnings

v0.14.0

  • nerves_system_br v0.13.2
    • OTP 20
    • erlinit 1.1.3
    • fwup 0.15.3

v0.13.0

This release is NOT backwards compatible with previous releases and will not upgrade old systems. With work, it is possible to upgrade old systems, but it is not recommended.

  • nerves_system_br v0.12.1

    • erlinit 1.1.1
    • fwup 0.15.0
  • New features

    • The application data partition is now ext4. This greatly improves its robustness to corruption. Nerves.Runtime contains code to initialize it on first boot.
    • Firmware images now contain metadata that can be queried at runtime (see Nerves.Runtime.KV
    • The boot partition is managed in an A/B style to support more robust firmware updates.
  • Bug fixes

    • The Linux kernel is no longer compiled for SMP. All Beaglebone variants are single processor.

NOTE: It is possible to support "failback" operation of firmware updates with the BBB. I.e. if an partition doesn't boot, the system reverts to the previous one. This is not implemented here, but this system is being made to align more with implementations that do this to make the transition easier.

v0.12.0

  • nerves_system_br v0.10.0

    • Buildroot 2017.02
    • Erlang/OTP 19.3
  • New features

    • Support for BBG Wireless - the BBGW's MAC Address is not automatically set so support needs to be added. However, one BBGW on a WLAN works.
    • Bump Linux kernel to 4.4.60

v0.11.0

  • New Features
    • Support for Nerves 0.5.0

v0.10.0

  • New features
    • Bump toolchain to use gcc 5.3 (previously using gcc 4.9.3)
    • Bump Linux kernel to 4.4.43

v0.9.0

This version switches to using the nerves_package compiler. This will consolidate overall deps and compilers.

  • Nerves.System.BR v0.8.1
    • Support for distillery
    • Support for nerves_package compiler

v0.8.0

When upgrading to this version, be sure to review the updates to nerves_defconfig. BR2_PACKAGE_ERLANG is no longer selected automatically and must be added.

  • nerves_system_br v0.7.0
    • Package updates

      • Buildroot 2016.08
    • Bug fixes

      • Many packages were removed. These include Elixir and LFE since neither are actually used. Both are added as part of the user build step, so no functionality is lost. The most visible result is that the system images are smaller and the test .fw file boots to the Erlang prompt.
      • Fix false positive from scrubber when checking executable formats due to C++ template instantiations. Ignores SYSV vs. GNU/Linux ABI difference.

v0.7.1

  • Package versions

    • Nerves.System.BR v0.6.1
  • New features

    • Pull in BeagleBone Green updates (new u-boot, bbg device tree)

v0.7.0

  • Nerves.System.BR v0.6.0
    • Package updates
      • Erlang OTP 19
      • Elixir 1.3.1
      • fwup 0.8.0
      • erlinit 0.7.3
      • bborg-overlays (pull in I2C typo fix from upstream)
    • Bug fixes
      • Synchronize file system kernel configs across all platforms

v0.6.2

  • Bug Fixes
    • Enabled bbborg-overlays for universal device tree

v0.6.1

  • Nerves.System.BR v0.5.1
    • Bug Fixes(nerves-env)
      • Added include paths to CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS
      • Pass sysroot to LDFLAGS

v0.6.0

  • Nerves.System.BR v0.5.0
    • New features
      • WiFi drivers enabled by default on RPi2 and RPi3
      • Include wireless regulatory database in Linux kernel by default on WiFi-enabled platforms. Since kernel/rootfs are read-only and coupled together for firmware updates, the normal CRDA/udev approach isn't necessary.
      • Upgraded the default BeagleBone Black kernel from 3.8 to 4.4.9. The standard BBB device tree overlays are included by default even though the upstream kernel patches no longer include them.
      • Change all fwup configurations from two step upgrades to one step upgrades. If you used the base fwup.conf files to upgrade, you no longer need to finalize the upgrade. If not, there's no change.

v0.5.0

  • Nerves.System.BR v0.4.1
    • Bug fixes

      • syslinux fails to boot when compiled on some gcc 5 systems
      • Fixed regression when booting off eMMC on the BBB
    • Package updates

      • Erlang 18.3
      • Elixir 1.2.5
  • Enhancements