buildroot VS meta-raspberrypi

I did it few times. It's so much easier nowadays with https://buildroot.org/

If you dig through the rootfs of the K1 it becomes clear that Creality is using buildroot so we should be able to do that ourselves - at least some of us.

An embedded system like Roku doesn't need to "run everything", it just needs to run their "platform", which is probably quite small. It's pretty trivial to assemble your own OS from "off-the-shelf" components. You can use something like buildroot to spin up a new OS in half a day, using only the components you want. You can also use "smaller" components that have far fewer features, meaning less bugs and less updates.

https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot

> I do this for every Windows installation that is used for similar purposes, like embedded machines that has to run a single application, virtual machines, etc.

Have you tried running Linux for these use cases? This sort of thing is an area Linux excels, in my experience.

When you run Windows, you're in for the whole kit and caboodle. Most of the components are proprietary, closed-source black boxes. You can only poke and prod and test and hope things don't break in unexpected ways.

Conversely, Linux can be easy stripped down to a bare bones kernel and a single statically-linked binary. I can run a useful application on top of Linux with the whole system weighing in smaller than bootmgfw.efi.

Something more complex, but still custom, is easily crafted with Buildroot.

https://buildroot.org/

Have a look at the commit history of Linux or buildroot for nice readable commit histories.

Gentoo could teach you more about what is involved in dependency handling and actual ‘construction’ of a Linux system. But Linux From Scratch is a much better teaching tool for learning this, and even things like Buildroot are arguably better than Gentoo for this because they generally force you to care about a lot of the stuff that Gentoo hides away to make the system nicer to use.

How do you figure Pis have bad integration with Yocto?

https://github.com/agherzan/meta-raspberrypi

For what it's worth, the entire Pi lineup is also well supported by Buildroot. In-tree, no less.

Embedded linux exactly. Major OEMs are using yocto. Check https://www.yoctoproject.org/

Been there. You don't want alpine or debian. Good gpos, but what you want is Yocto, which will let you build exactly and only what you need piece by piece including only the kernel modules for your hardware, the exact applications you use and no extras, and with a little extra tweaking, you can wire in Mender for ota updates and the ability to push custom images to clients that need specialization, or even fully unlocked images for customers that need it, plus if you're using an SD card, you can send users recovery drives instead of shipping full devices or let them build their own images without your proprietary code

I second Yocto. It's the kernel in use by the OpenBMC project

One last "option" is yocto but tis is not good for desktop, but it can be a fun project.