2022-05-18 –, Kirkstone
Yocto/OE is a powerful tool which can cover a wide array of tasks related to generating and developing software for a wide range of devices. All that power comes with the cost which has to be paid in the form of complexities when dealing with the system. To put it simply, Yocto is not simple.
One complexity one has to deal with in Yocto is managing layers and local configuration files when starting a new project. The “repo tool” and git submodules combined with a skilled use of TEMPLATECONF do alleviate some problems, but intuitive was never quite the word to describe that flow.
kas adds a layer of abstraction making it much easier to share a yocto project and help you get started with a build. At the same time it doesn’t sacrifice agility to gain that simplicity. You can build the entire project with a single command. At the same time, you’re one command away from an initialized bitbake environment if you need to deep dive the classical way.
In this talk we will present the basic usage of kas, explore how the tool is used and show a few convenient flows that can come from using it.
This presentation will give the embedded Linux development community an alternative of how to handle Yocto based projects. It is aimed to be a simple, example based talk to give the listeners a chance to quickly try out the examples and decide for themselves if they prefer the suggested flow.
Alan Martinovic is a Software Consultant for the domain of Linux and IoT with eight years of experience in the field of embedded Linux engineering. Alan has been involved in all steps of a lifecycle of an embedded Linux product from early pre market evaluation phase through automating device assembly processes all the way to support and maintenance of production devices in the field and managing customer’s technical expectations and identifying product use cases.
Alan has experience in a wide range of topics related to embedded Linux with a sub specialization in build systems (Yocto, buildroot, ptxdist), QA pipelines (gitlab, jenkins, avokado, labgrid) and embedded system architecture (systemd. Dbus, userspace IPC). He is currently working for Northern.Tech as an external consultant to improve the technical presales process.