MidgardOS Developer Documentation

A website documenting creating the build root for MidgardOS

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MidgardOS

This is the website that documents the build and design of MidgardOS.

Table of Contents

1. Principles
2. Features
3. Development

Principles

MidgardOS is a Linux-based server operating system that adheres to the following principles:

1. Reliable
2. Maintainable
3. Observational

Reliability

The Reliability principle means that the OS will, within reason, ship multiple versions of libraries when newer ones break backwards compatibility to allow older applications to work.

This does not mean that the OS will allow multiple development versions to be installed at once, but will install the versioned libraries to allow compatibility issues to be resolved by installing the appropriate version of the library. Note that this is not retroactive to before MidgardOS is released. Note that there are a few corner cases where this may require using containerization instead due to specific library versioning issues.

Maintainability

The Maintainability principle requires that the operating system will have automation tooling built in to allow operations and DevOps engineers to manage and maintain installs of the operating system at scale.

Observability

The Observability principle means that after installation, the default install will be able to be easly monitored, both for performance and operational health.

Features

MidgardOS will have the following features at first release:

• RPM-based
• Multi-library x86_64/i686 architecture
• Adhere to the merged / -> /usr configurration in most Linux distributions available now
• Be designed for modern server hardware
  • This means that we will target UEFI bootloading only
• Adhere to the FHS and LSB standards
• Ship with SSSd for LDAP/AD and other authentication features
• Purpose-created package repositories for specific server roles
• SystemConfigD, a new API driven extensible daemon for managing Linux hosts
• Utilitize modern system components
  • use most components that ship with systemd
    • Instead of GRUB -> systemd-boot
    • Instead of NetConf/Wicked/NetworkManager -> systemd-networkd and iwd for wireless
    • Instead of using the GLibC resolver stub -> systemd-resolved
    • Instead of chrony for system time sync -> systemd-timesyncd
    • Instead of using cron for system tasks, systemd timers will be used
    • Use systemd-coredump for managing application coredumps
    • Use systemd-oomd to manage the Kernel’s oom killer
  • To simplify the orchestration of firewall rules, use UFW instead of firewalld or raw iptables/nftables
  • FluentD in the installation pre-configured to allow exporting systemd-journald logs

Development

• Building the Base OS