Yocto Master Class with Mender.io

Homepage Yocto Master Class with Mender.io

As part of an ongoing series of webinars on The Yocto Project, Witekio recently hosted a live Yocto Master Class.

The event, which was held in partnership with Mender.io, lasted one hour and covered topics such as:

The challenges of managing multiple hardware and software targets within the same codebase
How to create a custom Yocto distribution targeted for multiple hardware and software targets
How to integrate Mender into your Yocto project

The webinar proved to be a much-needed resource and popular topic, with over 300 registrants from across the embedded software community.

Key viewers included Product Managers looking to better manage IoT-enabled products with multiple software or hardware SKUs, and Platform Engineers implementing board support for multiple SKUs which share a codebase, hardware platform, or both.

Our Expert Speakers

Speaking on behalf of Mender.io was the Head of Developer Relations, Josef Holzmayr. Josef has over 15 years of experience in development and is an ambassador for The Yocto Project.

As part of his role as a Yocto ambassador, Josef is involved in a variety of community and developer relations tasks, which include speaking at events and creating and curating training/learning resources.

Alongside Josef was Witekio’s own Nick Elsmore and Florian Rebaudo.

Nick Elsmore has worked as a Firmware Engineer and Embedded Software Engineer in the San Francisco Bay and Seattle/Bellevue areas for the past seven years. Specializing in low power applications, wireless embedded IoT, embedded Linux/Yocto, and AOSP frameworks, he is bringing considerable experience to the webinar in delivering robust solutions on a number of different hardware platforms.

Florian Rebaudo has worked as an Embedded Software Engineer for the last 9 years. His experience includes working on middleware applications for medical devices in France, before

moving to the Seattle/Bellevue area to specialize in Yocto and Linux kernel development.

Webinar Recap

Didn’t get a chance to watch the webinar live, or just want to recap on everything you learnt?

Don’t worry, we’re breaking down the event and giving you the resources in this article.

Click on the videos in each section to jump-start at the relevant times or rewind to watch from the beginning.

The Master Class Kickoff

Nick Elsmore kicked off the webinar with an overview of the upcoming Avnet-Embedded BSP product.

The product, which has Full SOM flexibility, works through an abstraction layer sitting on top of the BSP, and was built with Yocto.

Once launched, the Avnet-Embedded BSP will accelerate a product’s time to market vastly, as developers no longer need to wait for hardware to start application development.

Instead, they can start straight away with the Avnet-Embedded BSP virtual machine.

But What is Yocto?

The Yocto Project (YP) is an open-source collaboration project that helps developers create tailored Linux images for embedded and IOT devices or anywhere a customized Linux OS is needed no matter the hardware architecture.

It contains powerful tools for defining, building, and managing a Linux distribution and thousands of software packages actively maintained by the community are available and easy to integrate.

Creating Custom Distribution with Yocto

Diving deeper into meta layers, Florian Rebaudo explains how different layers interact with each other as well as the need for prioritization within Yocto.

Layer configuration is vital as it will tell Yocto which layer and files need to be installed in the image. Especially if you have competing hardware and software targets within the same codebase.

Click below to see Florian explain the basic development of a custom image, machine and distribution, as well as supporting multiple boards.

Mender.io & Yocto

Josef Holzmayr rounded off the master class with an in-depth look at some of the real-life concerns when dealing with BSPs, and how Mender.io uses Yocto to overcome them and deliver OTA system updates.