Denver Gingerich
Linux Plumbers Conference 2026
Wednesday 7 October 2026
one (of many) metric for code quality
requires a level of code understanding
demonstrates that this understanding exists
security
compliance
for a community distro, benchmark to be proud of
upstream-first approach means we solve at the root
timestamps
vendor-/target-specific firmware image format quirks
kernel modules, esp. if used on few targets
(support hash-based module integrity checking!)
beyond the build env (Managing variance)
many years of opkg history
>1 decade on reproducibility (slides) (video)
early work: Reproducible OpenWrt
but wait...
time to change everything
for the better!
a very pleasant package format
from shell scripts to C
main apk-tools fixes: file ordering, SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH
beyond Alpine: using v3 indexes already
let's not forget the tool itself
keen readers noticed inconsistent /init -
now fixed
teaching diffoscope even more formats,
for human-readable output
defaults is a hexdump diff; nice but...
lots of vendor-specific partitioning :(
thanks to OpenWrt, now supported by diffoscope!
https://github.com/aparcar/openwrt-rebuilder
builds exactly what the buildbots build
https://ossguy.com/talks/20261007_lpc/
become a Sustainer:
https://sfconservancy.org/sustainer/
Presentation and slides are: Copyright © 2023-2026 Denver Gingerich, and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Slide Source available.