Session

Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs) introduce new requirements for Linux distributions: minimal footprint, strong security posture, and reproducible, fleet-scale manageability. This talk presents IPU OS, a Linux distribution built as a layered downstream of Azure Linux via Intel’s Edge Microvisor Toolkit (EMT), leveraging the upstream lineage (Fedora → Azure Linux → EMT → IPU OS) for security, quality, and ecosystem alignment.

We describe how IPU OS avoids traditional distro fragmentation by consuming most user-space directly from Azure Linux while introducing IPU-specific functionality as a small set of RPM-packaged components. This enables a unified OS baseline across heterogeneous IPU environments, with product teams delivering software as packages rather than maintaining independent operating systems.

The session dives into the IPU OS software stack—including kernel, drivers, and user-space—and the role of RPM-based standardization in enforcing clear ownership, deterministic builds, and consistent lifecycle management. We discuss dependency resolution, build optimizations such as RPM caching, and CI/CD workflows that produce reproducible, immutable images.

Finally, we show how this model simplifies security patching by inheriting continuous updates from Azure Linux while minimizing validation scope through a reduced package set.