Following discussions with a customer, and as a teaser for our Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded course, we are now offering a 1-day overview seminar on this topic.

The main goal is to give you a clear view of the Yocto Project and the value it can bring to your embedded Linux device projects. You will have a guided view of its main features and quick demos, all done in an engaging and interactive way.

If you have other boards, read on, these instructions support multiple other Raspberry Pi boards.

Hardware

In this tutorial, we assume you have the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe to access the board’s serial port. You could use the GPIO UARTs too, but they are neither enabled by default at the bootloader level nor as a kernel console. Enabling them for serial console access would slightly complicate these instructions.

I’ve just produced a 4K video replay of my Devtool Hands-on Class at Yocto Project Summit 2024.12.

Here are the main reasons for shooting such a video:

• Compared to the official recording, this video is shorter without the pauses waiting for participants to complete their instructions.

• The video can be recorded at a better quality, both in terms of video and audio.

• The issues found during the presentation have been corrected.

• It’s possible to show presentation slides and command line terminals on the same screen.

The first sessions announced in 2024 are coming. We are opening in-person and online sessions open to individual registration, for our Embedded Linux and Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded training courses:

Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded
In-person – Feb. 25-28 2025, Avignon, France
Online – Mar 18-20, 25-27, 2025

Embedded Linux
Online, Apr. 14-17, 22-25, 2025
In-person, May 5-9, 2025, Avignon, France

Shared features

Both courses, online and in-person, share the same key features:

• 75% of active learning time through practical labs and activities. You won’t get more than 25% of the time going through theory.

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.

LinkedIn posts quickly fade out from view and may not last forever. Here is a copy of my most successful post in 2024.

Last Friday was my last day at Bootlin, the company which I created 20 years ago.

Bootlin is in good hands now, and has become a great contributor to many Open Source projects. I stayed there for three more years after selling it in 2021 to two of its engineers, Thomas Petazzoni and Alexandre Belloni. This was a very good experience to get back to engineering, especially contributing to the Yocto Project, teaching training sessions and sharing experience through speaking at international conferences. Bootlin has also managed to hire incredibly talented engineers over the years. However, working as an employee didn’t leave enough time to explore as many new techniques and resources as I was interested in.

Building and Simulating Linux Kernel Panic QR with DRM/KMS in QEMU

When a Linux system runs into a serious error that it can’t recover from, it triggers a kernel panic. This fills the system console with complex information, including registers, call stacks, and error codes. When the system console is on a serial line on terminal, such information is easy to copy to another machine for analysis. Retrieving all the data becomes much more difficult when the panic is displayed on a graphical console. You can take a picture with a smartphone but then getting the corresponding text back is tedious.