Yocto, RockPi and SBOMs: Building Modern Embedded Linux Images

1. buildroot

   1 53 2,954 10.0 Makefile

   Buildroot, making embedded Linux easy. Note that this is not the official repository, but only a mirror. The official Git repository is at https://gitlab.com/buildroot.org/buildroot/. Do not open issues or file pull requests here.

   

   Last time I tried Yocto, some people here on HN suggested that I try Buildroot instead.

   I don’t see any mention of Buildroot in this thread.

   Maybe things have changed since then and Yocto is now preferable?

   Regardless, if you are interested in Yocto it might be worth having a look at Buildroot as well.

   My thread from years ago, where people told me about Buildroot:

   https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18083506

   The website of Buildroot:

   https://buildroot.org/

2. InfluxDB

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3. yb

   2 1 20 5.6 Rust

   A Yocto setup and management tool that helps you keep your environment up-to-date and in-sync with your team

   

4. simplest-yocto-setup

   3 1 122 1.7 BitBake

   Working example of a yocto setup without unnecessary complications

   

   Yocto can be incredibly simple, this is my favorite example: https://github.com/bootlin/simplest-yocto-setup/

   Only the kernel and bootloader usually need to be specialized for most modern arm boards: the userland can be generic. Most of the problems people have with it are due to layers from vendors which contain a lot of unnecessary cruft.

5. SkiffOS

   4 43 764 9.1 Shell

   Any Linux distribution, anywhere.

   

   There’s also SkiffOS (https://github.com/skiffos/SkiffOS).

   It’s a project that uses buildroot to create a small Linux for a specific device that’s only used to start a container.

   I’ve wanted to try it sometime after getting headaches with both Buildroot and Yocto. Particular adding more libraries tends to break things.

6. pi-gen

   5 11 2,835 7.5 Shell

   Tool used to create the official Raspberry Pi OS images

   

   Maybe https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen works for you.

7. bootc

   6 8 1,118 9.8 Rust

   Boot and upgrade via container images

   

   I would suggest taking a look at bootc https://github.com/containers/bootc which enables you to use OCI / Docker containers as a transport and delivery system for OS updates. That makes available much of the tooling used to build and deliver container images for the purposes of delivering os updates.

   It's important to note that the container image itself is not executed upon boot, but rather unpacked before hand.

8. makrocosm

   7 1 0 7.8 Shell

   Framework for building customized Linux operating systems

   

   I've been working on something recently that you might find interesting: https://github.com/makrocosm/makrocosm

   It's not a shell script, but it has makefile rules that make it relatively simple to build a Docker image for your architecture, export it and turn into a filesystem image, build a kernel, u-boot, etc

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10. example-project

    8 1 0 7.6 Makefile

    Create minimal Alpine-based firmware for a variety of platforms using Makrocosm (by makrocosm)

    

    The referenced "example project" repo builds a basic Alpine image for the Raspberry Pi (https://github.com/makrocosm/example-project/tree/main/platf...) and others

    It was motivated by frustrations with Yocto at a new job after 8 or so years working on firmware for network equipment using an offshoot of uClinux.

11. meta-toradex-torizon

    9 1 17 9.4 BitBake

    Torizon OS OpenEmbedded Distro Layer

    

    > have not yet found a hardware independent Linux distro that can be reliably updated in an IOT context

    I'm part of the team that builds an immutable distro based on OSTree (https://www.torizon.io) that does exactly that.

    Docker/Podman support is first-class as the distro is just a binary, Yocto-based one that we maintain so users don't have to. You can try our cloud for free with the "maker" tier. To update a device you just drop a compose file with the web ui and massively update a fleet. You can even use hardware acceleration from the containers using our reference OCI images.

    The layer is open (https://github.com/torizon/meta-toradex-torizon) and will get Raspberry Pi support soon but you can integrate already easily with meta-raspberrypi.

    Happy to answer any questions.

12. meta-unit-kas

    10 1 0 8.4 Shell

    A collection of kas configuration files

    

    - Chaining together configuration fragments

    As another example, here is my kas setup for building rootfs images and container images for various different boards:

    https://github.com/unitexe/meta-unit-kas

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