The Linux Foundation Projects
Skip to main content
search
Category

Blog

Latest Long Term Support Release, New Platinum Member Boeing, and Developer Day 2024

By Blog, Featured

Scarthgap 5.0 release packed with 300+ recipe upgrades and improvements to a variety of critical areas.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 30, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — The Yocto Project, an open source collaborative project that developers use to create custom Linux-based systems, today announced the release of Scarthgap 5.0, the latest Long Term Support (LTS) release. This mega-release is packed with over 300 recipe upgrades and improvements to a variety of critical areas including core workflow, security, testing, Toaster web UI, packaging, and the roll-out of a new plug-in for VSCode among other available IDEs. As a Yocto Project LTS release, Scarthgap 5.0 will be maintained with bug fixes and security updates for 4 years.

Yocto continues to grow and is pleased to welcome Boeing at the Platinum level, alongside AMD, Arm, AWS, BMW Group, Cisco, Comcast, Exein, Intel, LG Electronics, Qualcomm and WindRiver. As a Platinum Member, Boeing brings extensive knowledge regarding Embedded Linux and Yocto Project usage in safety-critical environments to the project community.

“Yocto Project usage is subtle but extensive, powering the internet in routers through to telecommunications, automotive, aerospace, and much more,” said Richard Purdie, Yocto Project Architect. “We’re happy to welcome Boeing recognizing and supporting the project and now being able to publicly illustrate the project’s role in another key industry.”

“Boeing is honored to join the Yocto Project as a Platinum Member,” said Jinnah Hosein, Software Engineering Vice President and Chief Software Engineer of the Boeing Company. “Simply put, it’s the best technical solution available today for creating custom Linux builds for embedded targets. We recognize the long-standing hard work of the project’s maintainers, and we look forward to supporting them and contributing back into the ecosystem.”

“It is wonderful to see major companies that gain so much benefit from open source contribute back and invest in the sustainability of those projects,” said Andrew Wafaa, Yocto Project Chair. “I am delighted to welcome Boeing as a Platinum member to the Yocto Project and look forward to furthering both Boeing’s use of and influencing of the Yocto Project”

The Yocto Project is proud to announce the details for their annual Yocto Project Developer Day, taking place on Thursday, September 19 alongside Open Source Summit Europe in Vienna, Austria. This full-day event provides beginner and advanced developers with the opportunity to participate in a variety of sessions, presentations, and tutorials dedicated to the project and members of the community. The Call for Proposals is now open and accepting submissions for a variety of new and traditional topics, including Aerospace/Safety-Critical and Security.

The Yocto Project continues to drive open source collaboration around custom Linux-based systems. To learn more about Yocto Project, including how to become a member, contribute to the community, and register for Yocto Project Developer Day, please visit the Yocto Project website. Full release notes for Scarthgap 5.0 are available here.

Media Contact
Noah Lehman | The Linux Foundation
nlehman@linuxfoundation.org
</div class:”content-inner”>

May 31, 2024

Maintainer Confidential: Challenges and Opportunities One Year On

By Blog, Featured

A year ago I wrote an article to give some insight into how an open source project looks behind the scenes from a maintainer’s perspective. One year on, I thought it might be interesting to share an update on that.

Who I am and what the project is and does was covered previously and hasn’t really changed. In short, I’m the Yocto Project’s primary technical lead. The project allows people/companies to build and maintain customized Linux and open source software in general in a scalable and maintainable way. 

 

Who is using it? We often don’t know!

As the project continues to grow in usage, we keep finding out about new and interesting places it is being used. This is really exciting and what the project was designed for, so it is wonderful to see. The sad thing is that we can’t really talk about a lot of the usage. In some cases we find out by looking at the license compliance “bill of materials” that companies share. It is usually clear looking at the versions/names of the components that it is likely OpenEmbedded/Yocto Project derived but there is nothing we can quote to show that definitively. It is hard to demonstrate project usage or importance when you don’t know or can’t say who is using it. If you are using it, please let us say that you are! Please drop us an email or you can add to the list on our wiki.

Since last year the project has gained several members, some of them joining after reading the previous article and realizing the challenges the project was facing. This is great to see and really appreciated. The economic situation, globally and in this industry, hasn’t passed the project by and we have lost some members or some have downgraded, too.

The increased membership and participation has meant that the project can balance its budget and not forecast a deficit, hoping things will work out ok. For me personally, that does mean my job has a bit more security too; I’m not wondering if I’ll need to find a different income source in a few months. This also makes it easier for the project to retain some of our key help for things like documentation or maintaining our LTS releases. The time taken in training those people to the roles is not something which can be easily or quickly replaced so retention is important.

 

Sovereign Tech Fund support

The big news in the last year for us was finding that we could get some help from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), a German government funded initiative that is trying to help projects and the overall open software ecosystem. They read the article and wanted to see if there was a way to work together and help. The project had already been working on a five year plan, basically an open-ended discussion of where we’d like to see the project in five years’ time and what kinds of things might we like to see happen in that time frame. We found that we could take some of the themes from that plan and have financial help to bring them to reality.

Funding comes with constraints and it has been a challenge to do things in the time frame needed, but by contracting the work through many of the consultancies working within our ecosystem, we’ve been able to quickly pull together some amazing changes.

The projects we targeted were a mix across a spectrum of topics. Some are future looking with things like IDE integration into newer IDEs like VSCode. Some add automated testing to older code like Toaster, meaning we can stop it bit-rotting and degrading and start planning ways to better use it in the future. There was work to improve the developer experience both within our tools such as better understanding why cache objects (“sstate”) weren’t being reused, through to re-enabling patch submission/review processes automated CI-style helpers. There was also work done on properly documenting our security processes and preparing the project for the next generation of SPDX which is key to our Software Bill of Materials (SBoM) support.

Other projects include tool improvements to demonstrate and roll them out to other layers in the wider project ecosystem. Taking processes, techniques, and tools we have in the core and showing other layer maintainers how they can take advantage of them leads to wider ecosystem improvements in quality and productivity. We also have projects underway to explore the topic of binary packages in a source-based distro world and to look at ways we could improve our initial setup and user experience. Separate from the STF work, the project was also able to fund some improvements to the layer index but that wouldn’t have happened without the STF funding for other areas. The layer index works like a search engine for the project so it is of key importance to most of our users.

There were multiple good things to come out of all this work besides just the work itself. It meant that multiple members of the community were able to work on things that they have wanted to for a long time, knowing the benefit to everyone yet being unable to find a sponsor to allow them to spend that time. It also helped raise developer experience in a number of key areas, something we were conscious we were lacking.

I’d also note that the work was carefully planned to include and prioritize  test automation so that as well as fixing fundamental issues, we’re better placed to avoid some of these issues in the future, too.

 

Maintainer/developer resourcing issues remain

All this sounds really positive, and it most definitely is, but there was a bit of a darker side too. The core of the project was stretched thin and I remain the only full time developer at the core. Much of the writing and technical execution of the contracts therefore fell to me. I did realize this was likely to happen but the opportunity to fix so many of these long-term issues meant that I opted to push through it and make it happen. While I don’t regret it, I doubt I could sustain doing anything like this again.

The project has talked about “the bus factor” problem it has for a long time, and I’ve grown quite used to being hit by metaphorical buses in meeting discussions. In some ways I’m not as worried about this as I once was. Both Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded both have structures in place allowing a clear path to making decisions and those would work to allow the roles I fill to be replaced. It is ironic that when things are running relatively smoothly, people actually question the need for those structures, often not realizing that the time they really come into their own are in times of crisis.

The real concern now is one of scaling and overload and this is probably the key problem the project now needs to find solutions for. Funding is one challenge to improving this, it becomes an easier problem to solve if that is less constrained. The second challenge is the project has tried several times to write a job description for someone to shadow/assist/help me in various ways and we’ve struggled every time as my role within the project has so many hats and the skill sets overlap into what are traditionally different roles. When you add together the project and programme management pieces, the technical architecture oversight and vision, the bug fixing, general development skills, community relations and business relations pieces, good QA engineering skills and general operational execution, it gets complicated. The closest we’ve come was realizing that we needed both deeply technical programme management/execution and general but highly skilled development engineering help for me. This is still an ongoing discussion, so let us know if you have ideas!

 

Relevance in the wider open source ecosystem

There is a significant lack of understanding and recognition of what the project can actually do for the wider ecosystem and also for specific enablement. An interesting example is RISC-V support within the project. There has been community-driven support added over the last few years and it does basically work but the architecture has not been tested on our CI systems. The main reason for that is that those systems are high cost and maintenance, funded by the project membership and RISC-V does not have enough representation there. We’ve actively sought out platinum or multiple gold member participation from RISC-V interested parties but sadly there hasn’t been any commitment. The RISC-V story is particularly unfortunate since the project is about to release its next LTS which only happens every two years and it won’t be on the test matrix.

Besides the LTS, the project is extremely efficient at bringing in new versions of FOSS components as they become available when those upstream projects make releases. There is particular value in testing those on more unusual architectures such as RISC-V as early as you can, at the point of entry into the project and the wider ecosystem. By doing that it doesn’t just help Yocto Project support but also that support in other distributions too. We’re clearly struggling to showcase the huge benefit this has!

I’d also like to highlight another key feature of the project, which is the ability for users to own and control their entire build process. This means users don’t have dependencies on other companies or public services and that years from now, they have the ability to rebuild the software shipping in your products. Several recent examples of changes in availability of software or services, such as the structural changes around Fedora/CentOS, have made some users ask very valid questions about their reliance on other companies and their ability to “control their own destiny”. Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded were built to be able to solve that problem and there is no lock-in or reliance on others necessary.

Two other related areas the project has been able to help make step change improvements in is reproducibility and software manifests. For reproducibility we’ve worked with various upstreams to ensure the tooling is able to support it well (through compiler options for example) and that upstream software stops encoding things like build paths into binary output. For software manifest support, the project was proud to help test elements of the upcoming SPDX 3.0 standard to ensure some of the usage issues of the previous versions are addressed and that it fits well in a software build environment. With recent developments like the European Cyber Resilience Act and with similar changes already present or coming in other jurisdictions, being able to comply easily with these through good tooling and processes will be key.

 

Availability of developers

The huge demand for Yocto Project/OpenEmbedded skilled engineers does have one other rather unfortunate impact on the project core. That demand is great for ensuring people in the project have employment, however because the skills are scarce, they often aren’t allowed time to contribute to “upstream” or back to the project core. Understandably, they may also be asked to prioritize work on product specific layers in preference to core code and overall project architecture. The “layer” approach the project takes in some ways makes this much easier to do, too.

While understandable, the loss of access to people’s knowledge, and their ability to help work on bugs or improvements, is another significant challenge for us which I’m not sure how to address at this time. 

 

Summary

All in all, the last year has been really positive. The STF involvement was a very welcome surprise and we’ve achieved great things. Reading the article from a year ago, it is nice to be able to say that we’ve moved forward or even resolved some of those topic areas. Challenges remain though, particularly around participation in the project (both financial/membership and developer) if we’re to improve the overload problem.

Some of these issues are not unique to the Yocto Project and are faced by many open source projects. Regardless, I feel that we do need to be open about the issues even if we don’t have good solutions yet. While we don’t want to alienate our current developer community and maintainers, we’re trying to be open to new approaches and ideas, so please do get in touch if you think there is a way forward that we’re missing!

About the author: Richard Purdie is the Yocto Project architect and a Linux Foundation Fellow.

March 28, 2024

Empowering Digital Security: Your Comprehensive Guide to Navigating the EU Cyber Resilience Act with Exein

By Blog, Featured

The new EU Cyber Resilience Act is a big step towards better digital product security, aimed at protecting both consumers and businesses. This new rule from the European Commission covers the whole life of digital products, making sure they’re secure from start to finish. We want to make all digital stuff in the EU safer.

We’ve collaborated with Exein, a leading embedded systems cybersecurity company,  to create a guide for developers.

This guide is easy to use. It explains the Act and what it means for your projects. It’s written by experts in embedded systems and cybersecurity, and turns the Act’s complex rules into clear, practical advice.

You don’t need to sign up to get our guide. It’s free and open to anyone who wants to know more about the Cyber Resilience Act and what it means for cybersecurity.

Click the button below to get your free copy of the guide. Start learning about the Cyber Resilience Act and how it affects your work.

Download the Embedded Developers Guide to CRA
December 14, 2023

Latest Release, New Gold Member Witekio, and Virtual Summit

By Blog, Featured

The Yocto Project, an open source collaborative project helping developers create custom Linux-based systems, today announced the release of Nanbield 4.3. Announced on the heels of a recent funding boost provided to the Yocto Project from Sovereign Tech Fund, the release of Nanbield 4.3 features a host of new improvements, including security process improvements, year 2038 time fixes for 32 bit systems, prebuilt artifacts to accelerate builds and a new contributors guide along with all the usual component updates to integrate together the changes from hundreds of other upstream open source projects.

The excitement continues with the welcomed addition of Witekio as a Yocto Project Gold Member, joining Automotive Grade Linux, Huawei, Renesas, Siemens, and Texas Instruments. As a Member, Witekio brings its history of delivering innovative embedded systems and products to Yocto Project in addition to donating advocacy efforts.

“Advocacy and Training are critical functions of open source projects that tend to receive less fanfare than other project functions,” said Richard Purdie, Yocto Project Lead Architect and Linux Foundation Fellow. “Witekio brings expertise and funding, enabling us to do more on behalf of our community. Witekio’s involvement will increase project visibility and provide more opportunities to connect with the community through webinars and events.”

“We are incredibly proud to be recognised as a Gold Member of the Yocto Project.” stated Samir Bounab, CEO of Witekio. “This partnership highlights our unwavering commitment to open source software, which enables us to provide our clients with cutting-edge embedded and IoT solutions. We look forward to contributing to the Yocto Project’s growth and sharing our expertise with the community.”

Witekio’s own Pierre Gal will give a talk about elevating product quality with automated testing at next week’s Yocto Project Virtual Summit (November 28 – 30, 2023) alongside fellow community speakers in beginner and advanced tracks. Security expert Marta Rybczynska will provide updates on Yocto Project security and changes in tooling including the CVE scanning process, SBOM generation with SPDX, default options, and more. Registration is USD$40 – the full schedule and registration is available here: https://summit.yoctoproject.org/yocto-project-summit-2023-11/

November 22, 2023

Sovereign Tech Fund Boosts Yocto Project

By Blog, Featured

New funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund will help the Yocto Project drive significant transformation

The Yocto Project is a powerful and versatile open source initiative that offers a comprehensive set of tools and metadata, enabling developers to easily construct custom operating systems. With recently announced financial support from the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), Yocto Project will drive significant transformation in the open source community. nstead of relying on pre-compiled binaries, the Yocto Project allows for creating tailored Linux images easily targeted to a specific device’s hardware architecture. This flexibility makes it an invaluable resource for a wide range of applications, from embedded systems to Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

“Without fanfare, Yocto Project touches most people’s lives without their knowledge,” notes Richard Purdie, lead Architect at Yocto Project. “At least half the world’s internet traffic passes through routers built using Yocto. Add in mobile phone masts, software in cars, software inside core server components, and there are billions of devices all around us that are relied upon every day, making it a key piece of easily overlooked critical infrastructure software.”

The Significance of the Yocto Project and openembedded

While the Yocto Project may not be visible to end-users, its importance is undeniable. It is the foundational software infrastructure for numerous industries, including automotive, medical technology, consumer electronics, and telecommunications. Companies like BMW Group, OpenBMC, and many operating system vendors depend on the Yocto Project to build their products. This underscores its critical role in developing connected cars, servers, communication base stations, and more.

Automotive Grade Linux utilizes Yocto Project to create the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB), which is used by member companies in various connected car models. BMW Group also uses the software in some of its vehicles. The OpenBMC project uses the Yocto Project as a foundation and is, in turn, used by many hardware manufacturers in their servers (Dell, Microsoft, Meta, IBM, and others). Some operating system vendors also build their products on Yocto Project, supplying telecommunications companies that use Yocto Project, for example, in communication base stations.

Yocto Project has a close relationship with OpenEmbedded, the build architecture the project has adopted. Build architecture or framework describes the comprehensive set of compatible tools, scripts, metadata, and recipes that OpenEmbedded provides to simplify and automate constructing customized Linux distributions. Using this framework enables modularity, customization, and flexibility for developers.

There is an OpenEmbedded community and non-profit organization which oversees that architecture and technology. It doesn’t have member funding like the Yocto Project, so the Yocto Project has funded much of the work on OpenEmbedded. The two projects share codebases such as BitBake and OpenEmbedded-Core, so work on one directly benefits the other. Due to the ability to build everything from source including the toolchain, OpenEmbedded has often found uses in academic and research and development environments since it allows unconstrained experimentation at all levels of the source code. Many of the activities commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Fund contribute to OpenEmbedded-Core and thus to the many open source communities that build on it.

The funded work improves the long-term sustainability of the project by attracting a new generation of developers.

The Sovereign Tech Fund: A Game Changer

As IoT and embedded systems evolve, the need for specialized engineers to work on the Yocto Project becomes increasingly critical. Additionally, the Yocto Project shares codebases with OpenEmbedded, further emphasizing the need for investment in both projects. Recognizing the importance of the Yocto Project, the Sovereign Tech Fund has stepped in with a mission to enhance its efficiency, security, user experience, and developer engagement.

According to Purdie, “While the Yocto Project is widely used and depended upon, new technology projects tend to attract much more attention, and I’m heartened to see the Sovereign Tech Fund focusing on helping key pieces of infrastructure within the Yocto Project. The significant benefit we bring is that we can ripple the benefits and improvements out through entire ecosystems quickly and effectively, building on one of our founding principles: sharing and allowing collaboration on – and reuse of – processes and technology.”

The Sovereign Tech Fund’s support will be channeled into several key areas of development:

1. Build Process and Workflow Improvements:

  • Core workflow improvements, including enhancements to build tooling and workflows.
  • Development of the Yocto Project Reference Binary Distribution, focusing on workflow improvements and policies.
  • Introduction of Patchtest, an automated testing tool for code patches submitted via mailing lists.

2. Security and Quality Improvements:

  • Strengthening security processes and the security team.
  • Advancing Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs) for improved transparency.
  • Addressing tooling issues and enhancing quality-of-life features in Devtool, Recipetool, and Pseudo.

3. Integration and Usability Enhancements:

  • Updates and improvements to Toaster, a web-based UI for BitBake.
  • Integration of VSCode with Yocto Project for enhanced developer features and usability.

4. Layer Management Standardization:

  • Integration of OpenEmbedded Core best practices into Meta-OpenEmbedded.
  • Development of standard tools for managing Yocto layers, promoting layer tooling standardization.

Securing the Future of Yocto Project

The new resources provided by the Sovereign Tech Fund marks a pivotal moment in the Yocto Project’s journey. By addressing core workflow, security, integration, and layer management, this funding ensures the long-term sustainability of the project. Moreover, it creates an environment that is welcoming to new developers, encouraging them to contribute and eventually become maintainers.

On the matter of Yocto’s future, Purdie says, “With our increasing attention to security and requirements like software manifests, Yocto Project continues to provide solutions that are secure and innovative. Through this work and through collaboration with projects like SPDX the Yocto Project is well placed to deliver solutions that meet or exceed legislation requirements and allow us to take software accountability, security and update solutions to the next level along with leading developments in areas like software reproducibility.”

In Conclusion

The Yocto Project, with its source-based approach and wide-ranging applications, is a cornerstone of open source development. The Sovereign Tech Fund’s commitment to bolstering this project is a testament to its importance within the software ecosystem. As the Yocto Project undergoes these vital improvements, it continues to provide the foundation for countless industries and developers to build innovative and secure solutions. With these developments, the Yocto Project is poised to thrive and remain at the forefront of open source technology for years to come.

About the Sovereign Tech Fund

The Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital infrastructure in the public interest. Its goal to strengthen the open source ecosystem sustainably, focusing on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code. STF is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action (BMWK) and hosted at and supported by the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation GmbH (SPRIND).

October 10, 2023

Klepsydra AI – Cloud detection onboard from space

By Blog, Featured

Snapshot: Klepsydra OBPMark-ML Cloud Detection Demo in Progress

Klepsydra AI – Cloud detection onboard from space with a custom Linux distribution built by the Yocto Project

 

What is Cloud detection?

Cloud detection is a crucial process in Earth Observation used to identify and mask clouds in satellite imagery. This is necessary because clouds can obstruct the view of the Earth’s surface, making it difficult to accurately interpret and analyse the data.

Cloud detection algorithms typically use a combination of spectral and spatial information to differentiate between clouds and other features in the imagery. For instance, they may utilize information from various wavelengths of light to distinguish between clouds and land or water surfaces. They may also use contextual information, such as the size and shape of features in the image, to aid in cloud identification.

Once clouds are detected, they can be masked or removed from the image so that the underlying land or water surface can be analysed. This is important for a wide range of applications, including land use and land cover mapping, crop monitoring, and climate studies.

Cloud detection is also utilised in real-time applications such as weather forecasting and disaster management, where monitoring cloud cover and its changes over time is crucial. In these applications, cloud detection algorithms can track the movement and formation of clouds, providing valuable information for predicting weather patterns and identifying areas that may be impacted by natural disasters.

Klepsydra AI Excels Beyond Tensorflow Lite in Performance

Cloud detection onboard

Performing cloud detection onboard Earth Observation satellite offers several benefits over performing cloud detection on the ground:

  1. Faster response time: Cloud detection onboard the satellite enables near real-time detection and removal of clouds, which is particularly useful for time-critical applications such as weather forecasting and disaster response.
  2. Reduced data transmission: Transmitting large amounts of satellite imagery data to the ground can be expensive and time-consuming. By performing cloud detection onboard, only the useful data (i.e. data without clouds) needs to be transmitted to the ground, reducing data transmission costs.
  3. Improved data quality: Cloud detection onboard the satellite can result in improved data quality because the detection algorithms can take into account the unique characteristics of the satellite’s sensors and the viewing geometry. This can result in more accurate and reliable cloud detection.
  4. Increased availability of cloud-free data: By performing cloud detection onboard, the satellite can provide a higher percentage of cloud-free data, which is particularly important for applications such as land use and land cover mapping, crop monitoring, and climate studies.
  5. Improved efficiency of downstream processing: Cloud detection onboard the satellite can improve the efficiency of downstream processing by reducing the amount of data that needs to be processed on the ground. This can lead to faster and more accurate analysis of the data.

In Collaboration with ESA, Barcelona Supercomputing Center developed OBPMark-ML’s Cloud Detection Algorithm

KATESU project

The current commercial version of Klepsydra AI has successfully passed validation in an ESA activity called KATESU for Teledyne e2v’s LS1046 and Xilinx ZedBoard onboard computers, achieving outstanding performance results. During this activity, two DNN algorithms provided by ESA, CME and OBPMark-ML, were tested.

Onboard cloud detection is important to filter images that are sent to ground.

Klepsydra on a custom Linux distribution built by the Yocto Project

The Yocto Project is an umbrella organization for a number of open-source technologies which simplify the process of building and customizing Linux-based operating systems for embedded devices. It provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure, enabling developers to create highly optimized and tailored Linux distributions for their specific embedded systems.

In Klepsydra, the Yocto Project plays a crucial role in our workflow, particularly when it comes to generating Linux images for our LS1046 based computer. To begin, we set the necessary Yocto Project build tools up and configure the build system to specifically target our desired hardware platform. This ensures that the resulting Linux image is optimized and compatible with our LS1046 device.

To tailor the Linux kernel and other system components to our specific requirements, we create custom Yocto Project recipes. These recipes allow us to incorporate the necessary changes and optimizations, ensuring that the resulting Linux image is finely tuned to meet our needs. Additionally, we introduce the meta-virtualization layer to our Yocto Project setup, which enables us to include Docker in the final root filesystem of the generated image.

Once the build has been configured and our customizations have been applied, the next step is to generate the Linux image for our target platform. This involves compiling and packaging all the requiredcomponents, including the kernel, device drivers, libraries, and applications, into a deployable image file. This image file can then be flashed onto an SD card, effectively preparing it for booting Linux on our LS1046 device.

With the Linux image successfully booted on the target platform, we proceed to create the necessary Docker image directly on the LS1046 device. Leveraging the Docker capabilities provided by the meta-virtualization layer, we prepare a Docker image that encapsulates the specific software, dependencies, and configurations required for our testing purposes.

Once the Docker image is prepared, we launch a container from it on the target device. This container serves as a controlled environment where we can perform various tests and evaluations on the LS1046 device. By executing tests within the container, we can isolate and evaluate specific functionalities or scenarios, ensuring the reliability and performance of our software on the target platform.

Demo online

https://klepsydra.com/klepsydra-ai-esa-obmark-ml-online-demo-ii-the-cloud-detection-dnn/

The demo showcases the Cloud Detection DNN model executed on three identical computers, each with a different optimisation. The first computer runs Klepsydra optimised for latency (kpsr.lat), the second uses TensorFlow Lite, and the third uses Klepsydra optimised for CPU (kpsr.cpu).

Klepsydra AI demonstrates remarkable elasticity and high-performance capabilities. The kpsr.lat configuration can process up to two times more images per second than TensorFlow Lite, while kpsr.cpu processes the same number of images as TensorFlow Lite but with fewer CPU resources. These improvements are evident in both the Intel and ARM versions of the demo.

In summary, Klepsydra AI provides customers with a unique capability to adapt to their specific needs, whether it be latency, CPU, RAM, or throughput. This feature makes Klepsydra AI highly suitable for onboard AI applications such as Earth Observation onboard data processing and compression, vision-based navigation for in-orbit servicing, and lunar landing.

Acknowledgments

This demo was prepared as part of ESA’s KATESU project to evaluate Klepsydra AI for Space use. For further information on this project, please refer to https://klepsydra.com/klepsydra-ai-technology-evaluation-space-use/.

The OBPMark-ML DNN was provided to Klepsydra by courtesy of ESA. This algorithm is part of ESA’s OBPMark framework (https://obpmark.github.io/). For further information on this framework, please contact OBPMark@esa.int.

August 4, 2023

Yocto Project at Embedded Open-Source Summit 2023

By Blog

EOSS_Prague_230630_194

The Yocto Project was present at the Embedded Open-Source Summit, which took place in Prague, Czech Republic, between June 26 and 30, 2023.

The Yocto Project Dev Day, the first edition since 2019, was a big success, and was sold out. We even had to add tables at the back of the room at the end!

Slides and videos for the talks are now available:

A major announcement was also made on that day, extending the current and future Long Term Support (LTS) releases to 4 years. This guarantees that there will be sufficient overlap between such releases, and that device makers can rely on one release for up to 4 years.

Timeline of Yocto Project releases

There were at least four talks related to the Yocto Project at Embedded Linux Conference on the following days, and a well attended Birds of a Feather (BoF) session too:

Though not very crowded, we still had a constant stream of people passing by and chatting with our volunteers at the Yocto Project booth. This was an opportunity to see new faces, mostly people already using the Yocto Project.

Special thanks to Andy, Ross, and Philip, Josef and Megan who dedicated a lot of time to this booth, and to all the others who helped too.

We are happy to have new members joining the project. This forces us to print new banners at event events, but that’s a minor constraint, as members are critical to securing funding and engineering resources for the project.

Last but not least, the next edition of the Yocto Project Summit, an on-line event as usual, will take place on Nov 28-30, 2023. There should be one day of hands-on and training, and two days of sessions. We will start organizing this event from the end of August. Stay tuned on https://summit.yoctoproject.org.

Waiting for the next time we can meet in person, we are grateful for the Linux Foundation for hiring a professional photographer and sharing the below pictures of these memorable moments spent together…

Yocto Project booth

EOSS_Prague_230630_103
EOSS_Prague_230630_102
EOSS_Prague_230630_099
EOSS_Prague_230628_119
EOSS_Prague_230627_053
EOSS_Prague_230627_220

Yocto Project BoF

EOSS_Prague_230630_194
EOSS_Prague_230630_190
EOSS_Prague_230630_192
EOSS_Prague_230630_193

Philip Balister’s talk

EOSS_Prague_230630_015
EOSS_Prague_230630_016
EOSS_Prague_230630_020
EOSS_Prague_230630_024
EOSS_Prague_230630_017

Marta Rybczynska’s talk

EOSS_Prague_230628_269
EOSS_Prague_230628_272
EOSS_Prague_230628_267
EOSS_Prague_230628_265

Alexander Kanavin’s talk

EOSS_Prague_daily_230629_047

Various project contributors

EOSS_Prague_230628_325
EOSS_Prague_230628_348
EOSS_Prague_230628_137
EOSS_Prague_230628_349
EOSS_Prague_230627_163
EOSS_Prague_230627_105
EOSS_Prague_230629_255

August 4, 2023

PR: Exein, 4Y LTS, YPDD 2023

By Blog

 

Yocto Project Welcomes Exein as a Platinum Member, Announces Extended LTS Release Plan and One-Day Technical Summit

Yocto Project Invests in the Long Term, Continues Growth and Commits to Security with new Platinum Member.

SAN FRANCISCO – June 26, 2023 – The Yocto Project, an open source collaborative initiative helping developers create custom Linux-based systems, has evolved significantly over the last 12 years to meet the requirements of its community. The project continues to lead in build system technology with field advances in build reproducibility, software license management, SBOM compliance and binary artifact reuse. In an effort to support the community, The Yocto Project announced the first Long Term Support (LTS) release in October 2020. Today, we are delighted to announce that we are expanding the LTS release and extending the lifecycle from 2 to 4 years as standard.

The continued growth of the Yocto Project coincides with the welcomed addition of Exein as a Platinum Member, joining AMD/Xilinx, Arm, AWS, BMW Group, Cisco, Comcast, Intel, Meta and WindRiver. As a Member, Exein brings its embedded security expertise across billions of devices to the core of the Yocto Project. 

“Long Term Support (LTS) is one of our most asked about features, it is great the project is now able to commit to 4 years as standard for all our LTS releases,” said Richard Purdie, Yocto Project Lead Architect and Linux Foundation Fellow. “New members like Exein bring both specialist knowledge and funding, enabling us to do this and more. Exein’s involvement will truly bolster the security capabilities of the Yocto Project. The ability to offer enhanced embedded security is a major advancement in our pursuit of safer, more resilient systems.”

“The Yocto Project has been at the forefront of OS technologies for over a decade,” said Andrew Wafaa, Yocto Project Chairperson. “The adaptability and variety of the tooling provided are clearly making a difference to the community, we are delighted to welcome Exein as a member as their knowledge and experience in providing secure Yocto Project based builds to customers will enable us to adapt to the modern landscape being set by the US Digital Strategy and the EU Cyber Resilience Act” 

“We’re extremely excited to become a Platinum Partner of the Yocto Project,” said Gianni Cuozzo, founder and CEO of Exein. “The Yocto Project is the most important project in the embedded Linux space, powering billions of devices every year. We take great pride in contributing our extensive knowledge and expertise in embedded security to foster a future that is both enhanced and secure for Yocto-powered devices. We are dedicated to supporting the growth of the Yocto Project as a whole, aiming to improve its support for modern languages like Rust, and assist developers and OEMs in aligning with the goals outlined in the EU Cyber Resilience Act.” 

The Yocto Project is also excited to be hosting Yocto Project Dev Day on June 26 alongside the Embedded Open Source Summit in Prague, Czech Republic. Back for the first time since 2019, Yocto Project Dev Day brings together developers from across the Yocto ecosystem to participate in a variety of community sessions, presentations, and tutorials. For more information about the Yocto Project, visit yoctoproject.org.

 

Media Contact

Noah Lehman

The Linux Foundation

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org

 

June 26, 2023

Yocto Project at Embedded World 2023

By Blog

For the very first time, the Yocto Project had its own booth at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, on March 14-16, 2023.

Nathan Glimsdale, Thomas Roos, Francesco Salamida

Thanks to all who helped welcome visitors at the booth, and thanks to their employers too for sponsoring their time: Amazon Web Services, ARM, Foundries.io, Huawei, Koan Software, Mender.io and Savoir-faire Linux.

Visitors came from a mix of German and International companies. We had of course questions, beginner questions (“What is Yocto?”, “What hardware is supported?”, “What are BSP layers?”) and starter questions (“Where to start?”, “Where is the documentation?”, “What about releases?”), but also more specific questions (“How to generate SBOM”, “How to deal with licenses?”, “What are the best practices for…?”).

We also had visitors happy to visit the booth after years of using the Yocto Project to build their products, and say “Thank you”. One even came with his own patch and asked where to submit it and how (via e-mail or through a pull request). We also had questions about the next Long Term Support release, about how to build a hypervisor into an image, how to use an RTOS beside the Yocto image using the “multiconfig” features…

We had other visitors expressing interest in having their company join the Yocto Project as a member, providing financial and development support. Interestingly, we also had recruiters and students asking “what is that Yocto thing that so many companies want to find people experienced with it?”.

What also helped to keep the conversations going was the small goodies (Lebkuchen / cookies, Yocties, stickers…) which were offered, as well as the coffee machine sponsored by Mender.io. Our booth stayed busy until the end of the event.

The global impression was that this event allowed to reach a broader audience compared to the usual well known visitors at the Linux Foundation events. We are definitely interested in meeting more people at such industry events.

To finish, here are two interesting videos from the event and several photographs.


Andrew Wafaa was interviewed by Georgie Ryan-Casling from Witekio.


Andrew Wafaa was also interviewed by Charbax.

People lining up to ask us questions.

An LVGL demo built by Koan Software, in which the statically linked application fits in 800 KB.

Josef Holzmayr, Syed Rehan, Megan Knight

Andrew Wafaa, Marco Cavallini, Karim Yaghmour.

Yocties, stickers and Lebkuchen.

March 27, 2023

Yocto Project Dev Day in Prague, June 26, 2023

By Blog

Yocto Project Developer Day

The Yocto Project is happy to announce a new “Yocto Project Dev Day”, the first one since 2019.

It will happen on June 26, as one of the co-located events of the Embedded Open Source Summit (EOSS) taking place in Prague, Czech Republic on June 27-30, 2023.

The Yocto Project Developer Day is a one-day presentation and hands-on training event that puts you in direct contact with Yocto Project technical experts and developers. Its primary aim is to show developers how to create, customize, and optimize Linux distributions for embedded devices using the rich features, tools, and content of Yocto Project. Our knowledgeable and engaging instructors will help you better understand topics like build system workflow, working with containers, building applications, optimizing images, hardening your devices, and leveraging tools like devtool. You will also have a chance to network and put your new skills to work.

The cost will be $200, including drinks and breaks (except lunch). Register here.

The schedule is available here!

March 2, 2023

Shape the future of customizable embedded Linux.

Become a Member
Close Menu