Content definition in Content Resolver

The Automotive SIG relies on Content Resolver to define and select content, using CentOS Stream and CBS repositories as its dependency-resolution backends.

Definition layout

Content Resolver operates with four distinct input-definition types:

Repositories

Repositories group one or more package repositories and prioritize them for dependency resolution. The SIG uses CentOS Stream repositories and CBS and copr as fallbacks. With this mechanism, we can include packages that are not currently part of CentOS Stream.

Environments

Envionments represent the minimum recommended installation footprint. They list top-level, standard packages expected in every in-vehicle installation. The Automotive environment includes a set of packages required to boot the system on the target hardware platform, as well as additional components identified during functional safety and security requirements reviews.

Workloads

Workloads layer additional packages on top of the essential in-vehicle environment or extend the Automotive repository with new content that might be useful for development and testing. The two standard, defined workloads are the in-vehicle and the off-vehicle sets. The in-vehicle workload is empty and only inherits the environment component list. The off-vehicle workload extends the environment component list with various development tools. Additional experimental workloads can be added to visualize and analyze the impact of including new packages.

Views

Views unify the resolved workloads into a single, flat list of packages. The view effectively represents the Automotive package repository and can be used to build them in practice.

For more information about these input types, see the Content Resolver README on GitHub.

Adding your own content

To add new content to Content Resolver, the Automotive SIG recommends defining a new workload to extend the default environment. Definitions are managed on GitHub.

Use the automotive label to inherit the base in-vehicle environment automatically, and include the newly added package components into the unified view. You can choose to only list top-level packages because the service automatically resolves dependencies, but you can also list dependencies explicitly.

If the workload requires content not present in CentOS Stream or CBS, add additional repositories to the Automotive repository definition. Use a lower priority for the custom repositories to avoid masking content that comes from CentOS Stream or CBS.