EmberRTOS
EmberRTOS is Fireball Industries' own Linux distribution for the EmberNet edge: a hardened, immutable operating system built and maintained in house, tuned specifically for industrial control workloads. It is the OS that EmberNet edge nodes run on, locked down, atomically updated, and self-healing, so a machine you rack today keeps itself current and consistent for years with no hand-maintenance.
EmberRTOS ships in two variants that share the same immutable foundation and differ only in the kernel:
| Variant | Kernel | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| EmberRTOS (Standard) | General-purpose | Container hosts, gateways, telemetry, general edge compute |
| EmberRTOS RT | Real-time (PREEMPT_RT) | Motion control, safety interlocks, PLC/SCADA and drive timing. Anything with a hard deadline |
"RTOS" is the brand; the real-time kernel is a per-machine toggle, not a separate product. Both variants get the same branding, the same transactional update model, and the same management surface. You choose Standard or RT per node based on whether the workload has a deadline to hit.
Why an immutable base
EmberRTOS is immutable by design, so fleets stay reliable at the edge without a technician on site:
- Read-only root filesystem: the OS cannot be accidentally (or maliciously) modified at runtime.
- Atomic, transactional updates: every change lands as an all-or-nothing snapshot; if an update misbehaves, the system rolls back to the previous known-good snapshot.
- Automated maintenance: updates apply in the background and reboot inside a policy-controlled maintenance window.
- Container-native: the container runtime is preinstalled, and EmberNet workloads run as containers on top of a minimal, stable host.
See EmberRTOS (Standard) for the foundation and day-to-day operation, and EmberRTOS RT for the real-time variant, including measured worst-case latency on commodity hardware.
Editions
EmberRTOS (both variants above) is the immutable edge edition. A rolling, full-featured sibling, EmberRTOS Desktop, targets the control tier where operators interact with the system directly. The Desktop edition offers the same Standard and RT kernel choice. This section documents the immutable edge edition.