We are pleased to announce the TorizonCore 5.4.0 quarterly release for Toradex's System on Modules.

TorizonCore is our operating system that powers Torizon, a DevOps platform that simplifies the development and maintenance of embedded Linux software. TorizonCore is designed to be used out-of-the-box on devices requiring high reliability, allowing you to focus on your application instead of on building and maintaining an operating system.

Torizon uses software containers, making it simple to add functionality to your system in a way that is both secure and easy to maintain. Torizon supports hardware acceleration in containers and graphical user interfaces.

This release includes all updates from the previous 5.x.y TorizonCore releases.

Updates and Highlights

TorizonCore

• Boot time optimization
  This release of TorizonCore boots several seconds faster than on previous releases. The optimizations have a positive impact on all supported SoMs.
  Read our article TorizonCore Boot Time Optimization to learn more; including the current boot time measurements, how to measure the boot time by yourself, and how to further optimize the boot time for your specific use case.
  
• Device monitoring enabled by default
  Device monitoring is a feature requested by many of our customers. It makes it possible to check the health and monitor the performance of a device running TorizonCore.
  Fluent Bit is the log processor and forwarder that runs on TorizonCore and sends data to populate the remote monitoring service from the Torizon Platform.
  Learn more about this feature in our article Device Monitoring in TorizonCore.
  
• Container monitoring and recovery from Docker container corruption
  To improve the reliability of systems based on TorizonCore, we have added a Systemd service that automatically attempts to recover the system if containers fail to start. This feature is currently disabled by default and you must enable it.
  An additional Systemd service allows you to add your own health checks to validate that running containers behave as expected.
  Learn more about those two features in the article Reliability on Torizon.
  
• Base OS & containers synchronous updates
  The Torizon Platform enables two distinct types of remote updates:
  - OS: updates the base TorizonCore image
  - Application: updates the containerized applications
  From this release on, you can send both OS and application as a single update.
  This guarantees that both, the OS and application, are updated successfully, thereby avoiding version mismatch between them. If one of them fails, both are rolled back to the previous state.
  
  
• New device drivers enabled by default
  The AD5592, AD5593 and AD7124 device drivers are enabled as kernel modules.
  You can use them by applying your custom device tree or device tree overlays with the TorizonCore Builder Tool.
• Easier debugging of Aktualizr-Torizon with more verbose log messages
  It is possible to debug Aktualizr-Torizon with the help of Systemd's journalctl.
  To produce richer debug messages, we have added new event results logging. The messages are printed as Event: SomeEvent, Result - Some Result. See an example below:
  
  
• Update of TorizonCore packages
  The following packages have been updated:
  
  • Fluent-Bit updated from 1.7.3 to 1.8.3
  • Podman (experimental) updated from 3.1.1 to 3.2.3
  • Conmon updated from 2.0.18 to 2.0.29
  • Fuse-overlayfs updated from 1.5.0 to 1.7.0

Debian Packages and Containers

• All containers rebuilt against the Debian Bullseye stable release
  Bullseye has been released in its stable form on August 14^th. We have stopped using snapshots and rebuilt our Docker images against their stable feeds.
  
• Hardware-accelerated browser support with Cog in the kiosk-mode-browser container
  Cog is a single "window" launcher intended for applications that require a web browser on kiosk-mode. Cog leverages SoMs with GPU (i.MX 6 and i.MX 8 based modules). Currently, it doesn't work on devices that lack a GPU, like the i.MX 7.
  If you have been using Chromium in your products, we encourage you to test Cog and provide feedback.
  
• Development containers open-sourced to GitHub
  Two of our repositories were open-sourced and added to GitHub. They are the containers used in our Visual Studio and VS Code IDE Extensions for Torizon:
  - https://github.com/toradex/debian-cross-toolchains
  - https://github.com/toradex/debian-dotnet-development-images
  
• Portainer updated from 2.1.1 to 2.6.2
  Portainer is a user-friendly GUI for managing containers. This update does not have a significant impact on TorizonCore users.

Other Updates

• Several bug fixes
  Browse through cumulative bug fixes from 5.4.0-devel-202108, 5.4.0-devel-202109 and 5.4.0.
  Highlighted bug fixes:
  • The touch calibration container does not work on i.MX 8-based modules
  • Neofetch not showing the Torizon logo inside the Debian Containers for Torizon

Get more updates on this from our Release Notes.

Hardware Support

A quarterly release is intended to be used in a production environment only with volume products, as long as they are supported by TorizonCore.

• Added support for upcoming Colibri iMX6ULL 1GB
  Toradex is developing a new version of Colibri iMX6ULL, with 1GB RAM and 4GB flash. This is the first release that supports this Computer on Module.
  
• Volume products: Apalis iMX6, Colibri iMX6DL, Colibri iMX7D 1GB
  This release is intended to be used in production on these modules.
  
• Sample products: Apalis iMX8, Apalis iMX8X, Colibri iMX8X, Verdin iMX8M Mini, Verdin iMX8M Plus
  Due to the hardware status of samples, this release is intended for development.
  For Verdin, only the second generation of Verdin products is supported.