Why Yoe

Yoe Distribution is intended for creating a deployment template for embedded linux distribution, it uses OpenEmbedded build system and several tools from yocto project in the process to establish a fairly, user friendly, reproducible workflow. The primary focus is on simplicity and ease of use, while maintaining a robust system, that is reflected in careful selection of tools and processes.

Introduction

Yoe Distribution is intended for creating a deployment template for embedded linux distribution, it uses OpenEmbedded build system and several tools from yocto project in the process to establish a fairly, user friendly, reproducible workflow. The primary focus is on simplicity and ease of use, while maintaining a robust system, that is reflected in careful selection of tools and processes

Workspace Setup

We use git submodules to setup full workspace, since git is primary SCM used for metadata layers and other build artifacts, its easy to use power of git itself to archive a multi-repository setup, instead of using another external tool to manage bunch of git repositories

Docker as builder

Organizations and individuals might have different Linux and non-linux environments in-house, and adding yet another host operating system prerequisite is adding to the problem. Instead Yoe distribution employs docker runners, There is a standard template which is had needed pre-requisites for build Yoe Distribution packages This also helps in creating a reproducible build environemnt many years down the lane, when host distros would have moved to newer verisons and it would be hard to find VMs or machines running specific distribution on host, that problem has been abstracted with use of containers in Yoe distributions build environment.

Setup

Setup is using a shell script to setup OpenEmbedded build environemnt and get it ready to build. It works with several shells, but bash and zsh are more often tested, there are additional tools which are provided as builtins in this setup. The tools help in creating most frequent tasks that are performed by embedded system builders and developers, e.g. flashing an image, updating the workspace, setting up local feed server, adding/deleting metadata layers to name a few, whats more powerful is that it can be extended to local workflow environments by overriding or adding new functions

Distribution Feature Policies

Embedded systems have requirements to make custom choices for core components like, compiler, C library init-systems,grpahics, windowing systems etc. Yoe distro provides pre-existing templates called YOE_PROFIILE to select a combination of them, at the same time, makes sane choices for other policies which are requires but are not often marked for selection

Images

Yoe Distribution provides a few base images, for common usecases

• yoe-simple-image - Basic console image
• yoe-debug-image - Image with ptests, debug tools, profiling tools this can be used for running -ctestimage targets
• yoe-qt5-wayland-image - Reference image with QT5 samples, e.g. cinematicexperience running out of box on wayland/weston
• yoe-qt5-x11-image - Same as above, except it uses X11 instead of wayland
• yoe-qt5-eglfs-image - Same as above except it does not use X11 or wayland but runs on EGLFS directly
• initramfs-image - Small image for bundling into kernel as initramfs used as updater or recovery
• yoe-simpleiot-image - Reference tiny image, suitable for IOT devices

Reference Machines

Its regularly tested on, raspberrypi3,beaglebone black along with QEMU machines for all supported architectures e.g. ARM/ARM64/x86/x86-64/ppc/mips/mips64/RISCV64/RISCV32