Decision D4 · 4 of 21
Plant Box hardware and OS
Fanless industrial PC on Linux; customer VM as fallback
RECOMMENDED
- Status
- RECOMMENDED — awaiting Vinayak
- Options
- Fanless industrial PC with Linux; vendor edge gateway; customer-provided VM
- Trade-offs
- Cost, support, OT acceptance, remote update path
- Recommendation
- Fanless industrial PC (x86 or ARM, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB industrial SSD, two Ethernet ports for OT and IT sides) on a long-term-support Linux with read-only root and signed A/B updates pulled from the cloud. Customer-provided VM is the fallback where the plant forbids new hardware; vendor edge gateways are not planned.
- Why
- Two network ports allow the IEC 62443 zone and conduit split. Read-only root and A/B updates give a safe remote update path. A VM keeps the door open for plants with strict OT policy.
- Evidence
- E26 (zones and conduits); EDGE
edge-agentalready cross-compiles in Go. - Reversible
- Yes. The runtime is containerised, so hardware can change per plant.
- Blocks
- D3 heartbeat soak, fast read, writer.
Page history: last 2 changes
- docs(research): retire stale research to archive/research-2026-10 with a register
ab84821 - docs(technical): split decision board into DECISIONS.md
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