Design
This page is the entry point of the design chapter and it includes many links to more detailed explanations of the mentioned topics. In order to understand the complete system design, please read the following page and all linked pages.
Products Built By embEDUx
The software that is built by the buildserver will be referred as products within the further documentation. This helps to distinguish between software that is used throughout the build system, and software that is being built using the build system.
The design for the embEDUx system must be created carefully by analyzing the project requirements that have been determined by the underlying circumstances at the HTWG and it's lab-courses.
The requirements include a wide variety of necessary configuration options which need to be considered for the design of the different products. This in turn requires a configurable build system, which must be able to build the following software
Buildserver
While the build configuration must be user providable for each individual build. Each individual build represents a configuration change that has been made by the user. The buildserver must react to these changes and start the build process.
Hardware Deployment Tool
Deploying the built products to the platforms includes several steps. embEDUx provides a deployment tool to make this process easier for the user.
Specification Storage
To store the product specifications corresponding storage units must be implemented.
Cross-Target Support
Even though the number of ARM-systems is growing, most Desktops and Servers are still running on x86-based hardware-architectures. The platforms that are used within the lab-courses are all based on the ARM architecture. Since the purpose of the embEDUx buildsystem is to build and deploy complete Linux-based systems for these hardware platforms, cross-target support is absolutely necessary for the project to work.
Comparison With Similar Projects
The idea of building a complete Linux-based system for a specific platform is not new. Therefore it is of no surprise that by the time of designing embEDUx there are several open source projects that have similar project goals. These projects need to be considered as a base for the embEDUx project. The following projects have feature specifications, that could possibly fulfill the requirements that have been analyzed and collected on the requirements page. The projects will be evaluated in order to find out if they suitable as base projects.
Overall System Design
This is how the system has been designed in the beginning. Take a look at post-evaluation system design how the design evolved throughout the evaluation phase.
