Happy to share the slides from my Devtool hands-on class presentation at Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2025.

Devtool is a very helpful tool for creating and maintaining recipes. I’m very happy I accepted to take over the traditional devtool hands-on class at the Yocto Project Summit in 2024, because devtool provided invaluable in my Yocto work since then.

Thanks to the additional experience, a devtool section was added to Root Commit’s Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training course, and the hands-on slides got a complete overhaul compared to the 2024 version. The 2025 version is also based on the upcoming Whinlatter version, and is also expected to be compatible with the next Wrynose LTS version.

Here are the slides of the “Building and Maintaining Binary Distributions with the Yocto Project” presentation I gave at the Embedded Linux Conference in Vienna.

The abstract I submitted is a good way to describe my presentation:

Imagine a world in which you can try the Yocto Project without even using it. This was possible in the past with the Ångström distribution, offering ready-made images which could be extended through binary package feeds. Though Ångström is long gone, the Yocto Project still has the ability to generate such images and package feeds. While system makers are still using this feature, the Yocto Project itself has never published such binaries.

The Yocto Project, thanks to funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund, has recently developed its abilities to support binary distributions, by creating tooling to verify the ability to upgrade the images built for its releases through package feeds, and to support managing a “local” distribution that can customize packages offered by an “upstream” distribution.

Since Yocto is about recipes, I will first present a cookbook for building your own images so that they can be updated through package feeds. I will then describe the recently developed features related to binary distributions and what possibilities they open for the Yocto Project and its users.