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Hardware drivers sometimes need a closed-source shared library to talk to the device. A FLIR camera SDK, a vendor LiDAR decompressor, or a mount-control DLL fall into this bucket. ADOS plugins can include these binaries, but the manifest must declare them honestly so operators see the trust signal in the install dialog.

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Declare the binary

In manifest.yaml: 
agent:
  vendor_binaries:
    - path: "agent/vendor/libfooflir.so"
      sha256: "<computed-by-pack.sh>"
      vendor: "FLIR"
      license: "Proprietary"
      purpose: "Decode radiometric Y16 frames into Celsius"
pack.sh computes the hash from the staged file. The signer key covers the binary too via the manifest signature, so any tampering between sign and install fails verification.

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Trust signal in the install dialog

The two-stage install flow shows a “Vendor binary” badge on the risk panel whenever vendor_binaries is non-empty. The operator sees:
  • The binary’s path inside the archive
  • The vendor name and license string
  • The purpose line, in the operator’s locale
The dialog labels the plugin as “Mixed source” rather than “Open source” in the trust column. Operators can still install, but the signal is loud.

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Loading the binary at runtime

The agent unpacks the archive into the plugin’s data dir at install time. The binary lives at /var/ados/plugins/<plugin-id>/agent/vendor/libfooflir.so. 
import ctypes
from pathlib import Path

class FooFlirDriver(CameraDriver):
    def __init__(self) -> None:
        sdk_path = Path(__file__).parent.parent / "vendor" / "libfooflir.so"
        self._lib = ctypes.CDLL(str(sdk_path))
The plugin runs inside its sandbox, so the binary cannot escape the plugin’s permission set. A vendor .so that tries to open /dev/video0 still requires the plugin to declare hal.dev_video in its manifest.

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License note

Open hardware files and developer docs that Altnautica ships are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. Plugins that wrap GPL or CC0 source are themselves GPLv3 by default. A plugin that wraps a closed-source vendor .so is still GPLv3 in its own source files, but operators see the “Mixed source” badge because of the vendor binary inclusion.

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Architecture support

The pack script does not validate that the .so matches the target SBC’s architecture. Ship architecture-specific subfolders if your plugin runs on both aarch64 and armv7l: 
agent/vendor/
├── aarch64/
│   └── libfooflir.so
└── armv7l/
    └── libfooflir.so
And resolve at runtime: 
import platform
arch = platform.machine()
sdk_path = Path(__file__).parent.parent / "vendor" / arch / "libfooflir.so"

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See also