Nerves system updates and provisioning devices

We’ve released new versions of all of the officially maintained Nerves Systems. The official systems, nerves_system_rpi0, nerves_system_bbb, etc., are now at v1.1.1. Going forward the version numbers will likely diverge due to board-specific bug fixes or features.

This is a patch release, but since this is also my first posting of a release to the Elixir forum and there are likely many people who haven’t upgraded to v1.1.0, let me go over the highlights:

1. We’ve updated to Buildroot 2018.05. This includes many updates to embedded Linux components and if you’ve made a custom system to use a non-Elixir program, you’ll probably want to review the release notes. If not, this change will likely be invisible. As a policy, we try to keep the official systems sync’d to the latest version of Buildroot to pull in security patches.

2. We’ve made it easier to provision serial numbers to devices and fixed a couple annoyances in this area. If you have more than one Nerves device or just want to give it a name rather than use the board’s built-in device ID, take a look at https://embedded-elixir.com/post/2018-06-15-serial_number/.

3. We’ve added a field called meta-uuid to unambiguously identify the software running on a device. The Nerves .fw files can be queried offline for this UUID by running fwup -m -i <filename.fw>. On the device, you can run Nerves.Runtime.KV.get_active("nerves_fw_uuid") to see what’s running.

Raspberry Pi and Beaglebone users - the next release will likely contain a Linux kernel update to 4.14. We know several users have already updated. This is a big update (especially for the Beaglebone), so if you’ve already done it and have experience to offer, please let us know.

Thanks!