Favorite Recipe - How the Yocto framework brings Linux to IoT devices

The Yocto project gives you all the tools you’ll need to build a custom Linux for IoT device.

- Mohammed Billoo and Joe Casad

Hardware has always been a challenge for the Linux community. Although it is possible to compile the Linux kernel and its surrounding applications for almost any hardware, doing so can be complicated. It actually takes significant effort to adapt an operating system for a hardware platform. Giant companies such as Microsoft and Apple have unlimited resources to work out the details with hardware vendors, but Linux has been left largely to its own resources for most of its history.

Today Linux developers are in close contact with mega chip vendor Intel, and Linux has proven its value on ARM, AMD, MIPS, and several other leading hardware platforms. Debian alone supports 10 major architectures, some in multiple variations.

But what happens if you’re starting from scratch on a wholly new hardware system? Or if you’re designing a new product and the available OS alternatives for the board you’re using don’t meet your needs? Is Linux an option?

Some Linux distros are already designed for the embedded space, but if they don’t offer the features you need – or if they offer too many features you don’t need – they can be difficult to adapt. (See the box entitled “OS Options.”) The complications of rolling your own system used to rule out Linux for many embedded projects, but Yocto is working to change that perception.

The Yocto project [1] describes itself as “…an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products, regardless of the hardware architecture. The project provides a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded devices [2].”