Openembedded

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. ...

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… ...

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. ...