Yocto 5.0 Scarthgap released, Bootlin contributions inside

Yocto Project SummitThe latest release of the Yocto Project, version 5.0, code named Scarthgap has been published a few days ago. The release notes provide the best summary of what’s new in this release. Being a Long Term Support (LTS) release, it will be maintained during 4 years with bug fixes and security updates, which makes this release particularly important for a large number of embedded Linux projects and products.

At Bootlin, we are using Yocto for a large fraction of the Linux Board Support Packages that we develop, maintain and upgrade for our customers. But we’re not only users of Yocto: we’re also contributors and maintainers. In this blog post, we’ll highlight our contributions to this release, which take various forms.

openembedded-core

First of all, our contributions to the openembedded-core repository:

So overall, Alexandre Belloni and Alexis Lothoré mostly contributed to the testing/CI infrastructure, João Marcos Costa contributed a fix to the documentation, Michael Opdenacker contributed a few package bumps, enabled package management in the core-image-full-cmdline image as part of his work on the Binary Distro Prototype, and provided a few fixes to some tests, and finally Thomas Perrot provided some updates to the OpenSBI package, which he uses as part of his maintenance work of the meta-sifive layer, used for RISC-V platforms from SiFive.

But perhaps more important is that out of the 1652 commits that went into openembedded-core between Yocto 4.3 and Yocto 5.0, 685 commits were approved by a Bootlin engineer: indeed Bootlin engineer Alexandre Belloni, sometimes assisted by Luca Ceresoli, are members of the SWAT team and as part of this, they review, test and approve patches submitted by the community before they get ultimately applied by the Yocto lead architect Richard Purdie. This contribution from Bootlin to the project is not very visible, but gives us a fairly unique insight on what’s changing in the Yocto Project.

bitbake

We also contributed to the bitbake project, which is the tool/engine that orchestrates the overall build.

Most of the contributions were made by Michael Opdenacker as part of his work on the Binary Distro Prototype, which requires updating the prserv to handle “pass through” mode and hierarchy data.

yocto-docs

The documentation of the Yocto Project is also an area where we contribute significantly: Michael Opdenacker is the maintainer of the Yocto Project documentation, and this time around João Marcos Costa helped by writing the release notes for the 5.0 release.

Here are the details of our contributions:

In total, 173 commits were merged in the yocto-docs repository between Yocto 4.3 and Yocto 5.0, 74 commits were authored by Bootlin engineers, and another 98 commits were reviewed/merged by Bootlin engineer Michael Opdenacker, as the Yocto documentation maintainer.

Other contributions

We also contributed a few changes to the meta-yocto repository:

And to the yocto-autobuilder2 repository:

Conclusion

In conclusion, our contributions to the latest Yocto Project release, version 5.0 (Scarthgap), underscore our deep involvement in both the utilization and enhancement of this critical toolset for embedded Linux development. Through significant contributions to openembedded-core, bitbake, and yocto-docs repositories, we have not only improved testing and CI infrastructure but also enhanced documentation and package management capabilities.

If you need help with using Yocto for your embedded Linux projects, we offer engineering services and a dedicated training course with open-source and freely available

Thomas Petazzoni

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

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