Your own Linux image on the open Linux nodes

06 Nov 2026

Since the December 2026 maintenance, the open Linux nodes of IoT-LAB (the IoT-LAB A8-M3 boards first) boot a Debian image built with Docker instead of the Yocto image, and you can boot your own image on them.

Your image is an ordinary Docker image, built on top of the IoT-LAB one and pushed to Docker Hub:

FROM fitiotlab/iot-lab-open-linux-base:1.0.4
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends htop \
    && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

Add it to the nodes of your experiment, and they boot it:

iotlab-experiment submit -n my-image -d 30 -l grenoble,a8,1-5,image=docker.io/<you>/my-image:1

The tools of your experiment are ready on every node from the start, the same on all the nodes, and the image is yours to keep and share.

What changes with the new images:

• each node has its own root filesystem, removed at the end of the experiment (with Yocto, the nodes of an experiment shared one): install in your image, with iotlab-ssh run-cmd, or in ~/shared;
• the journal of each node is copied in ~/.iot-lab/<experiment id>/journal/<node>/ at the end of the experiment.

Upgrade the CLI tools to 3.4.0 (pip install -U iotlabcli) to use image=, or use the web portal. Read Linux for the details and limits, and follow the tutorial for your first image.