2025-12-04 –, Walnascar
Vendor Board Support Packages (BSPs) are the standard for bringing new silicon to market, showcasing features, and promising an "easy" start. However, for those of us building products with long-term lifecycles, these BSPs often fail to meet quality requirements. They can be overly intrusive and typically don't separate feature showcases from the well-maintained base needed for product development. This focus on rapid demonstration frequently results in BSPs which are difficult to maintain, lack transparency, and are built on non-LTS Yocto and kernel versions, making them unsuitable for products expected to last 5, 10, or even 20 years.
This talk will take a critical look at the state of vendor BSPs from an integrator's perspective. We will explore the common pitfalls: opaque custom tooling, automatic inclusion of demo software, reliance on unmaintained kernel forks, and the widespread avoidance of Yocto LTS releases. We'll discuss the differing perspectives of vendors and product developers, examine both good and bad real-world examples, and make the case for why writing your own sleek BSP layer is an absolutely valid strategy. Writing your own board descriptions and leveraging the stability of mainline Yocto and Linux kernels is not as daunting as it seems and can be the key to building truly sustainable and maintainable products.
Anna-Lena Marx is TechLead for Embedded Linux at inovex. With degrees in Embedded Systems (M.Sc.), Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering, she specializes in creating robust systems with Yocto, focusing on lifecycle strategies to help companies navigate long-term product compliance.