2026-05-29 –, Mistral
This presentation tries to make the case to add APK to eventually remove IPK/OPKG from Openembedded.
Openembedded Core currently supports several package archive formats:
- DEB created by debian
- RPM created by Red Hat
- IPK from NSLU2 Optware
Both DEB and RPM are well supported by their respective communities, while the IPK format is supported nowadays by the opkg package manager. The opkg package manager however is not that well supported any more. The OpenWRT project which heavily used opkg before has since moved on to use the Alpine Linux Package Keeper (APK) format.
This talk explores the existing package manager integration within OE core and will try to provide an initial investigation on how to add APK to Openembedded Core.
At first building the labgrid hardware access layer, Rouven nowadays works on security solutions for embedded devices.