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Provisioning and sharing system for SBCs

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Provisioner per-board sidecar for serial access, flashing, and bring-up

by acarminati·Feb 16, 2026·9 points·1 comment
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AI Analysis

●●SolidNiche GemSolve My Problem

Purpose-built SBC provisioning sidecar—owns serial, multiplexes SSH, delivers boot artifacts.

Strengths
  • •Solves genuine pain: serial console ownership and safe multi-developer board access in labs
  • •Artifact provisioning over TFTP/HTTP lets boards boot before persistent storage works
  • •Pluggable power control and SNMP PDU support show domain understanding
Weaknesses
  • •Extremely narrow audience (embedded labs), unlikely to gain adoption outside that niche
  • •Sparse documentation and no evidence of active community or real-world usage
Target Audience

Embedded Linux developers, hardware labs, SBC builders

Post Description

Hi HN,

I’ve been building a small infrastructure tool called Provisioner: a per-board provisioning sidecar for SBC bring-up and lab automation. https://github.com/alessandrocarminati/provisioner

The model is simple: one instance per board. It sits next to the hardware, owns the serial console, exposes access over SSH, and serves boot artifacts (kernel, initramfs, rootfs) via TFTP/HTTP. It’s designed for the phase where networking is unreliable, storage is half-flashed, and UART is the only thing still telling the truth.

What it does

- Serial console ownership + SSH multiplexing - Monitor shell + serial tunnels - Scriptable boot interaction - Artifact provisioning (TFTP + HTTP) - In-band file transfer over serial - gzip/base64 hacks + XMODEM - Derived from my earlier send_console-ng utility https://github.com/alessandrocarminati/send_file-ng - Pluggable power control - SNMP PDUs, among others cheap ESP8266/Tasmota devices - Serial logging - Lightweight access control

Provisioner also embeds a minimal init runtime (goinit) inside the kernel initramfs, acting as its on-board provisioning agent, handling flashing, artifact retrieval, and reporting management state back over serial.

Routing & stream handling

Internally, Provisioner routes serial traffic through a pluggable router:

- Producers/consumers attach as components - Human vs machine clients handled differently - Unicast control sessions - Broadcast multiplexing to multiple observers

This allows several users or services to watch the same console without interfering.

Filters

A filter subsystem can intercept and modify serial streams on the fly.

Originally added to mitigate ANSI Device Status Reports (e.g. Cursor Position Report issues) when tunneling serial consoles, but it doubles as a general stream rewriting mechanism for automation and normalization.

Positioning

Not trying to replace large systems like LAVA.

This is aimed at:

- Homelabs - Bring-up benches - Kernel/BSP work - Small shared labs

Think lab automation you can deploy in an afternoon, not fleet orchestration.

Project is still evolving but already in daily use. Feedback and abuse welcome.

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