Raspberry Pi Finally Conquers Userland

Raspberry Pi developers have had quite a coup on their hands this past few weeks. The "official" Raspberry Pi Linux distribution Raspian was just upgraded to Debian 8, or "Jessie." This provides a huge number of wins - the 4.1 release of the Linux kernel, latest glibc and build chain updates, more native packages (like Node.JS and wiringPi), and device trees. Oh, sweet device trees.

While the current Raspian distribution still relies on wiringPi 2.24, the most recent 2.29 version has a much nicer way of addressing GPIO in userspace by exposing the GPIO ports in /dev/gpiomem. All too often Raspberry Pi developers run GPIO apps as root to access the array of general purpose I/O pins, however this leads to all the lovely security holes and vulnerabilities that privileged access brings. You never want Apache or Python or any user-created apps running as root - so instead you must find a way to export these ports and allow unprivileged users to access them. Traditionally this has been done using wiringPi's export utility, however the latest gpiomem exposure seems to be much cleaner.

With Jessie I've been able to significantly cut the complexity of installing Garage Security and Sprinkler Switch. I don't need to manually install wiringPi, Node.JS, Video4Linux and a number of other packages. Things seem to largely "just work" as one might expect of a modern distro. One example is that Motion has been updated and appears to be pre-packaged on Raspian, and the necessary Video4Linux bcm2835-v4l2 kernel module properly creates a /dev/video0 device. CPU utilization appears to be much lower with the current stack, and it appears that I can just tweak Motion's configs to save videos in an HTML 5-friendly way rather than transcoding them with a script.

Garage Security and Sprinker Switch are being updated now for Jessie and testing is underway... the new Jessie builds are looking very promising so far.