2026-05-29 –, Mistral
One of the key benefits of the Yocto Project is the ecosystem of layers providing reusable hardware support, software packages and configuration policy - saving you the work of re-implementing everything from scratch yourself. But with many layers available, there is an almost uncountable number of different combinations of layers that may be encountered in a Yocto Project build. The challenge is - how do we ensure that these different combinations will work as expected?
The Yocto Project Compatible program and the yocto-check-layer script have been created to address this challenge. By following best practices and testing the compatibility of your layers, you can ensure that they work well in combination with the rest of the Yocto Project ecosystem.
This talk will introduce the Yocto Project Compatible v3 program and the requirements for achieving Compatible status. It will explain how to run the yocto-check-layer scripts to test different types of layer and how best to automate this test within a CI/Autobuild system. Best practices to ensure layer compatibility will be discussed, building on my "Creating Friendly Layers" talks from past Yocto Project summits. The talk will finish with conclusions and future work which may be expected in these areas.
Paul Barker is the Ecosystem Engineering and Operations Lead at the Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation project. He has been working in Open Source and Embedded Linux for over a decade, with experience supporting clients in the automotive, industrial, and telecommunications sectors. Paul has contributed to several open source projects including the Linux kernel, U-Boot, and Yocto Project. He has presented at FOSDEM, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Linaro Connect, and multiple Yocto Project summits.