The complexity of embedded computers has changed dramatically in recent years, and open source technologies have offered increasingly powerful and adaptable solutions. Specifically, many are turning to Linux for building embedded devices, but its diversity in distributions sometimes makes supporting the necessary functions a challenge. Yocto was started by a group of companies in 2010 in an effort to solve this by building an architecture that is modular and layered with a design that minimizes incompatibilities between different configurations.
Bitbake is at the center of this effort from the Yocto community; it’s a build tool that uses metadata files to configure both the Kernel and the associated applications. This can reduce the process of migrating a build from one device to another to something as simple as a recompile. This is a major effort, and is taking some time to fully implement, but once it is finished it should help make deploying Linux configurations across multiple embedded devices types much simpler.
