NASHVILLE, Tenn.: Peridio, creator of Avocado OS, the device infrastructure platform for Physical AI, today announced a partnership with BayLibre, an Open Source software engineering firm whose team includes some of the most active contributors and maintainers in the Linux kernel, Yocto, and Zephyr communities. Together, the two companies are bringing production-readiness to Physical AI.

Physical AI is reaching production faster than the software underneath it was built for. Robots, autonomous machines, smart cameras, and intelligent industrial systems are quickly moving out of the lab and the teams building them are discovering they have quietly taken on the job of maintaining an operating system. The partnership pairs Peridio with BayLibre's System-on-Chip software engineering so those teams can ship a secure, managed fleet without reinventing the software supply chain.

The two companies are announcing at Embedded World North America, where they are also co-hosting a happy hour for teams building Physical AI products.

Shipping the first device is just the beginning

Getting one unit working is what most teams obsess over. What comes after it is not. The device has to survive unattended operation, update itself over a network nobody controls, and roll back on its own when something goes wrong, often with no one on site to intervene.

Reproducibility is the first thing to go. Unit 40 has to run exactly what unit 1 ran, and the moment that stops being guaranteed, everything downstream is a guess: debugging, updates, security response. That is not a scaling problem a team grows into. It is a platform problem they already have.

That leaves teams with a choice they should not have to make. A general-purpose Linux distribution buys velocity now and costs production readiness later: it assumes standardized hardware, attended operation, and centralized deployment, and Physical AI breaks all three. A custom Yocto build solves the right problems, but iterating on one quickly and without critical mistakes takes years of experience - and dedicated systems engineering talent most teams cannot hire fast enough.

"Teams don't set out to own a Linux distribution. You patch a driver, pin a kernel, add an update script and a year later there's a distro under your product that one engineer understands," said Bill Brock, CEO and Co-Founder of Peridio. "Each wave of computing introduces a platform layer that commoditizes the parts nobody should be rebuilding. Edge computing is still highly fractured and complex. The rapid pace of robotics funding and innovation over the next couple years will be the forcing function that makes this unavoidable."

Why BayLibre is betting on Avocado OS for Physical AI

Building the platform layer takes two disciplines that rarely live in the same organization. The first is software engineering down to the metal: boot chains, device trees, drivers, cross-compilation, secure boot, and the upstream maintainership that keeps all of it viable across a product's lifetime. The second is platform design deliberate enough that an application engineer will actually adopt the result.

Avocado OS is a production-grade, Yocto-based Linux distribution for embedded and Physical AI devices, built around immutability, security and composability – decoupling OS engineering from application and AI model development. Peridio Core includes fleet management, deployment orchestration, remote diagnostics, and secure access as an integrated product.

BayLibre is among the strongest practitioners of developing Open Source software for semiconductors and Physical AI hardware. Its engineers maintain Linux kernel subsystems including the Common Clock Framework, Industrial I/O, DRM/display, and power domains; hold maintainer roles in Yocto's openembedded-core, Zephyr, U-Boot, and the GCC toolchain including the NVIDIA GPU offload port; and have ranked among the top 20 corporate contributors to recent Linux kernel releases. The firm is staffed entirely by senior engineers whose business is taking products to production at volume.

"We ship production software for a living, and the most difficult part for our customers has never been the application, it is everything between the application layer and the metal,” said Michael Turquette, CEO of BayLibre. "Peridio has built an architecture that is right for where Physical AI is going, and BayLibre continues to bring production-grade solutions to Avocado OS. And it is no secret that Avocado OS is our first choice when one of our customers needs a production-grade, managed OS. In a real partnership, both sides sharpen the other, and that is precisely the relationship we have with Peridio."

Joint engineering to harden Avocado OS

The partnership is already producing work, and it runs in both directions. BayLibre engineers are working alongside Peridio's on Avocado OS itself, contributing to the hardening and software supply chain integrity work that separates a demo or prototype from a production-grade platform that a company can defend in an audit.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. A system hardened after the fact is only as good as the last person who remembered to run the checklist. A reproducible, image-based build emits its own bill of materials, signs its own updates, and verifies its own root filesystem, because that is how it is constructed.

EU Cyber Resilience Act readiness becomes a property of the build

The timing is not incidental. The first EU Cyber Resilience Act obligations take effect in September 2026, requiring manufacturers to report actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents. The essential requirements underneath - SBOM transparency, secure update mechanisms, secure-by-design engineering - apply in full in December 2027. Both reach any company selling connected products into the European market, North American manufacturers included.

As those obligations land, the teams in the best position are the ones whose platform already produces the evidence. SBOM generation, signed atomic updates, verified boot, and continuous vulnerability monitoring are inherent to how an Avocado OS image is built, which turns a large part of CRA readiness from an integration project into a reporting exercise, and gives teams a defensible starting position rather than a scramble.

What this means for teams building Physical AI

• One build system instead of one per target. Consolidated, reproducible builds across an entire hardware portfolio - NVIDIA, NXP, Renesas, Synaptics, and more.
• The same configuration on different silicon. Moving between targets is a configuration change, not a re-platforming project.
• Separation of concerns that survives to the device. The image format enforces the boundary between systems and application work instead of relying on team discipline and merge windows.
• Independent update channels. Operating system, application, and AI model artifacts ship on their own cadences rather than one monolithic release.
• Supply chain transparency by default. SBOMs and software provenance emitted by the build, not assembled before an audit.
• A migration path, with engineers behind it. Teams already on Debian, Ubuntu, or containerized stacks can move without starting over. BayLibre is available to do the work with them, along with board bring-up, silicon enablement, real-time and ROS 2 tuning, and custom hardening.

"Partnering with BayLibre means the layer underneath our customers is engineered by people who have been maintaining it upstream for years," said Brock. "Teams should be building what differentiates their product, not infrastructure."

See Peridio and BayLibre at Embedded World North America

Both companies will be at Embedded World North America, September 22–24 in Anaheim, California.

• Peridio is exhibiting at booth #6324 and in the show's inaugural Robotics Lab, demonstrating GOAT Racer One - an autonomous sim-to-real platform running the same Avocado OS runtime in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and on the vehicle.
• Peridio CTO and Co-Founder Justin Schneck is presenting two sessions: So You Decided to Ship a Robot on September 22, and The Missing Platform Layer: What Physical AI Demands from Embedded Linux on September 23 - a working walkthrough of image-based dm-verity root filesystems, composable system extensions, fault-tolerant OTA over constrained links, and building supply chain transparency into the release pipeline.
• BayLibre engineers will be at the Peridio booth throughout the show for teams that want to go deeper on board bring-up, kernel and BSP work, real-time tuning, or hardening a product that is already in the field.
• Peridio and BayLibre are co-hosting a happy hour on September 23rd from 6:00-8:30pm PST at Puesto to mark the partnership.

For teams building Physical AI products and figuring out what it takes to get them into the field, visit peridio.com. You can also:

• Explore Avocado OS →
• View Peridio’s hardware support matrix →
• Learn about BayLibre's engineering services →

Fonte: Business Wire