Episode 37: Better Built By Burkhard

working with an unsupported and outdated BSP is a bad idea.

:100: agree with @burkhard!

With Yoe, @khem does the hard work of tracking master branches and monthly releases. When we start a new project, the first thing we try is to get their BSP building in Yoe. This is not always possible, but the best case for maintaining the project going forward. We try to encourage customers to use hardware that tracks new OSS releases. While I don’t advise using rPI in industrial systems for a number of reasons, they do a really good job of ustreaming their software – it is probably the best-supported Embedded Linux platform. i.MX processors are decent and companies like Variscite do tolerably well – they have been accepting some of Khem’s patches.

The biggest tragedy of Yocto is layer fragmentation – most developers build their products on long-lived forks and don’t contribute much back upstream or every upgrade to new versions of Yocto – it is just too painful.

A lot of this goes back to the complexity of building software written in C/C++, which is the primary reason Yocto exists. We keep adding layers and layers of complexity – this is not sustainable. Modern languages like Rust, Go, and Zig are built from the ground up with good support for cross-compiling. This is a significant paradigm shift and is the future. For IoT platforms, Go works exceptionally well. It will take time, but the future is coming …