OpenConf, 22–23 November 2024. Recording.
Residential broadband devices have had spare compute for years and almost nothing runs on them. This talk was about why that gap has stayed open and what has to be true before it closes.
The constraint people underestimate is memory. A gateway will give a container something on the order of 128MB, which rules out most of what the container ecosystem assumes about its environment. That pushes you to OCI images built on Alpine and musl rather than glibc, and to stripping virtual binaries until the image lands somewhere between 15 and 20MB. Smaller also means a smaller attack surface on a device sitting in someone’s home.
The second constraint is the build. These are 32-bit and 64-bit ARM targets, and a developer writing C, C++ or Go should not have to think about that. Cross-compilation belongs in a container-based toolchain behind a CLI, wired into dev containers and CI, so that shipping to a gateway looks like shipping anywhere else.
The third is lifecycle, and it is the one the industry has spent longest avoiding. Installing, updating and removing third-party software across a fleet of millions of devices is a management problem rather than a packaging one, and the legacy remote-management model was never designed for it. prplLCM is the open answer to the runtime and lifecycle half.
The half I did not have a good answer for then, and still think is unresolved, is the layer above it: catalog, curation, signing, distribution. The runtime has been open source for years. Nothing at the catalog layer is.