On 18 October 2013 12:41, Joshua Kurland <[email protected]> wrote: > Why Yocto instead of Ltib?
Although embedded devices are much more powerful (CPU throughput, MMU ability, RAM capacity, flash size, graphics acceleration, etc) than they ever have been in the past, for most of their history (and even today) installing a desktop distribution onto an embedded device has either not been practical or is not necessary. So embedded devices have always needed embedded solutions to this problem. Additionally most embedded devices require a cross-compiler environment for development work. Historically everyone solved these problems using their own, "home-brew" solutions. The list of problems associated with the home-brew solutions is quite lengthy. Although many of them shared various ideas and solutions, each one still required their own learning curve and had their own quirks. Even within a given company, different boards/products would have different (incompatible) home-brew solutions! (due to different teams solving the same problems in their own ways) As an end-user you were at the mercy of whatever the manufacturer provided. Some solutions were stuck at very old versions of various components making it almost impossible to use newer Linux features and drivers. Others were so cutting-edge that nothing seemed to ever work. Then, to make matters worse, some frameworks would simply get abandoned as new products came to market. Home-brew solutions often required special host system setup/configuration that would fall outside the purview of the build framework itself, making it hard to migrate to a new machine or for a group of developers to collaborate on the same project from separate development host machines. The list goes on an on... and often you only ever stumble upon the faults of a given framework after you have shipped product or are mere days away from release and suddenly realize some major requirement can't be easily fulfilled. So the whole embedded Linux development ecosystem was badly in need of some sort of consolidation. ...and that's where Yocto comes in. Yocto is a project endorsed by The Linux Foundation, so it tries to be manufacturer/vendor neutral. And instead of creating or picking an embedded distribution and standardizing on that, they decided to back a framework that helps you create your own distribution. Had they simply chosen a distribution and asked everyone to use it I think fewer members/developers would have backed that decision than have backed the decision to use a distribution-creation framework instead. No one distribution is ever going to satisfy everyone's needs, but if everyone used the same tools to create their distribution it will be easier for people to understand and work with it. So "why use Yocto"? Because it is about time we stop re-inventing the wheel (from scratch) every time a new embedded board comes out :-) I feel for your situation. Almost all of the companies for whom I've worked in the past were replete with managers who preferred to look behind rather than forward. There are so many "problems" that Yocto already has answers for (even if you haven't stumbled upon them yet!) entire manuals could be written describing them (and more!) :-D _______________________________________________ meta-freescale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/meta-freescale
