Embedded

Radxa Dragon 6AThe Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized single-board computer built around Qualcomm’s QCS6490 — the same silicon family found in the Fairphone 5 and Qualcomm’s own RB3gen2 reference platform. It packs an octa-core Kryo 670 CPU, an Adreno 643 GPU, and a 12 TOPS Hexagon NPU into a board with Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, HDMI, triple camera connectors, and an M.2 NVMe slot. Starting at around $60, it sits in an interesting spot — significantly more compute per dollar than a Raspberry Pi 5, with a genuine ML inference pipeline that doesn’t require an external accelerator. Qualcomm provides Yocto builds for RB3Gen2 boards and Radxa mentions this in their documentation but doesn’t provide any how-to. In this article, we shall explore the steps taken to get Yocto running with Mainline Linux Kernel. ...

Introduction Orange PI 3B is a cheap and attractive Raspberry Pi sized single board computer based on the Rockchip RK3566: Rockchip RK3566 (4x ARM Cortex-A55 @ 1.6GHz) ARM Mali-G52-2EE GPU (OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1/3.2, Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 2.0) LPDDR4 RAM (2/4/8 GB) Micro-SD card slot SPI flash (16/32 MB) Optional eMMC pluggable module (16/32/64/128/256 GB) Wi-Fi5 + Bluetooth 5.0, BLE 1x USB 2.0 Type A OTG, 2x USB 2.0 Type A HOST, 1x USB 3.0 Type A Host 1x HDMI (up to 4K @ 60fps) 1x MIPI DSI LCD port 1x MIPI CSI camera port Colour-coded 40-pin GPIO (uart, spi, i2c, pwm, gpio) Gigabit Ethernet port Optional M.2 M-KEY PCIe port 89 x 56 mm The versions with 2 GB / 4 GB / 8 GB of RAM are currently sold at 38 / 44 and 66 EUR on the manufacturer’s AliExpress store. For the same amount of RAM, the price is much lower than Raspberry Pi 5 (currently 98 EUR with 8 GB of RAM), and you can use PCI Express without an additional board. This being said, Raspberry Pi 5 has its own strengths, such as dual 4K HDMI output. ...

Training or consulting? In partnership with Amarula Solutions, I was in discussion with an Italian company, Novavision. Moving to a new hardware platform, they wanted to take the opportunity to gain ownership of the tools that are used to build their products, here Yocto, instead of subcontracting this part of system development as they did previously. Their first idea was to order our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training course. However, facing project deadline pressure, they also wondered whether consulting wouldn’t be a better choice to get their new project started in an efficient way. However, they didn’t want to fall back to subcontracting what they want to learn. That’s how the idea of a hybrid solution came up: consulting and training at the same time! ...

Introduction Five days ago, I received the Orange Pi RV2 board I ordered. For about 54 EUR / 64 USD (+ shipping), this board has very attractive features, in particular: Top view - Source Orange Pi- 8 GB of LPDDR4X RAM (2 and 4 GB options exist) 8-core K1 64 bit RISC-V CPU 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports 2x M.2 M-Key PCIe2 sockets… great to plug-in PCIe devices, in particular NVME SSDs. 3x USB 3 and 1x USB 2 ports WiFi and Bluetooth 128 Mb SPI flash Micro-SD card and eMMC (not populated) Full-size HDMI Others: 2x MIPI CSI camera interfaces, MIPI DSI display connector, general purpose headers, buttons, jack audio… All this is amazing, and if not for the slower CPU compared to Raspberry Pi 4 (according to reviews I read), this board could be more appealing than the Raspberry Pi 5 itself, which has just one Gigabit Ethernet port, no SPI flash and needs an additional “HAT” to connect just one PCIe device. Raspberry Pi 5 has two HDMI ports though, sadly micro-HDMI ones. ...

This is another blog post about securing your Yocto built systems: Securing Yocto Built Systems overview presentation slides Yocto Security: Production and Development Images Yocto security: Kernel Hardening Introduction The Linux kernel is the cornerstone and stronghold of a Linux based system. Unlike user-space applications which run with limited privileges, if it’s compromised, there is almost no limit to what an attacker can do. While nothing is unbreakable, there are two types of settings you can change to make your kernel harder to compromise: ...

Bookmark After a brief announcement two weeks ago, here is the new Yocto command reference bookmark, in a format you can print and modify, according to the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. In particular, the PDF version is ready to be printed. This way you will get 5 bookmarks on double-sided A4 paper. The documents were created with the Scribus open-source publishing application. It’s a great program to create leaflets, brochures and any professional looking documents. Sources are available in our GitLab repository. ...

This blog post is part of a series about securing your Yocto built systems: Securing Yocto Built Systems overview presentation slides Yocto Security: Production and Development Images ⬅️ Yocto security: Kernel Hardening What to avoid So, you use Yocto to build an image for your embedded device. You tweak the image and distribution settings to get the features you need, and other developers use the SDK built by Yocto to create and build the User Interface and other applications. ...

Last week, I gave a “Making Yocto Built Images More Secure” presentation at the Embedded Linux Conference in Amsterdam. The main goal was to share the research I’ve done so far for a customer project, and gather feedback from the audience. ...

A variant of this article also exists as a conference presentation. Do you already have a job in embedded Linux but wish to be given more challenging goals? Or are you in IT, already using Linux on your own laptop, and dreaming about landing an embedded Linux job, possibly starting as your own boss? Follow my advice in a patient and consistent way, and you will achieve your goals in less than 12 months. ...

Kernel Recipes conference in Paris One of the best for Linux kernel topics 😉. Recommended by Root Commit!I discovered a intriguing phenomenon while preparing my How to test the latest mainline Linux kernel or bootloader presentation at OpenEmbedded Workshop 2025. It turned out there was something incomplete in my understanding of BitBake variable overrides. Let’s take the example of a meta-mainline recipe from my Kernel Recipes: SRC_URI = "git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git;branch=linux-6.13.y;protocol=https" Then, depending on the MACHINE setting, I want to use an override to add files or patches to SRC_URI… ...