I haven't used it, but there's also Avocado OS [1]. Myself, I use Yocto for our embedded build. It's not perfect but for our application, which involves building a bunch of software that uses both Swift and Flutter for an embedded audio product running on a RPi CM4, it works just fine. Shout out to Mender for A/B updates.
Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
11–20 of 92 posts
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#12I'm surprised to see no mention of Guix. It solves all of these issues, and already has a good story both for cross and native builds on a variety of architectures. Adding new targets is deceptively easy, just copy an existing template and substitute your values. https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/system/... https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/bootloa...
Does guix have any advantage here over nix?
Lisp
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#13Modern SBCs are just normal computers and not "embedded" in the traditional sense. You can generally just use Debian, and spend time on the actual project, instead of wrestling with the system
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#14I'm surprised to see no mention of Guix. It solves all of these issues, and already has a good story both for cross and native builds on a variety of architectures. Adding new targets is deceptively easy, just copy an existing template and substitute your values. https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/system/... https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/branch/master/gnu/bootloa...
Does guix have any advantage here over nix?
I didn't know Nix had support for embedded systems. Where are the images defined?
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#15Modern SBCs are just normal computers and not "embedded" in the traditional sense. You can generally just use Debian, and spend time on the actual project, instead of wrestling with the system
I agree. In the past, I have successfully used Debian and Alpine for embedded. Never needed to compile OS kernels or standard DLLs, other people already did and published in these package repositories.
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#16Modern SBCs are just normal computers and not "embedded" in the traditional sense. You can generally just use Debian, and spend time on the actual project, instead of wrestling with the system
For more mainstream SBCs, totally agree. However a lot of the niche industry boards (especially new ones) only support Yocto out of the gate. Debian might be "supported" by the SoM/CPU vendor but manually reapplying kernel patches and praying it boots is a PITA.
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#17I've been using Nix for "embedded" systems for few years now and it works fine. I don't quite understand why "embedded" has historically meant learning a completely separate tool. I've been building for x86 and ARM servers for 5+ years now, so why should targeting an ARM board be any different?
Like the article points out, the software stacks people use for embedded devices are the same as people use non-embedded use; Rust, Go, NodeJS, and sure still C++. The only real difference with embedded devices is non-OS components like the bootloader (u-boot, EDK2) and customizing the device tree. (And of course firmware flashing). Fundamentally those are all just packages that I can describe in Nix. I don't need a separate tool just because the board is small.
IMO the embedded space, especially in the US, is already pretty Niche. Most companies either just ship the vendors BSP example (Ubuntu/Debian/Yocto) and pay very little attention to the detail or re-useablity. Once you vendor declares the BSP EOL you are stuck unless you re-implement it yourself.
Using Nix (or Guix) has the massive advantage of a large and active community that isn't fractured like the Yoctoo/Buildroot community. (By fractured I mean there may by many, many people using those tools at $DAYJOB but due to vendor BSP customization they likely share much less with the upstream community maintained sources).
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#18I've used buildroot extensively, and an occasional yockto. My impression in recent years is that these image cross build environments are just not as frequently needed as they were back in the day of their invention. My most recent embedded linux environments were just embedded archlinux. No need to cross build an image, just install and run the minimized linux environment right on the target. Of course, a big part o…
Are you proposing compiling on the target? For a vast number of embedded systems that is not only impossible (insufficient disk and memory) but also incredibly slow. At the end of the day you need some cross compilation just for board bring up. If you're playing with some platform for which this has already been done, then sure, but that's not really the "normal" way of doing embedded.
Embedded just means ARM 99% of the time and it's cheaper and easier to use native ARM servers (AWS has them cheap) than to make 100% of software cross compile. Some parts of the firmware might need to be cross compiled but those projects are designed to cross compile.
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#19I’ve been experimenting with what a next-generation embedded Linux build system might look like: native builds on the target architecture, modern language package managers as first-class citizens, and AI as a primary interface to the system. Instead of cross-compiling with a large meta-layer stack, the tool builds kernel, rootfs, and applications together using one engine, with a CLI, TUI, and AI assistant talking to…
Armbian and Qemu worked well for me when I needed to compile packages for an orange pi without enough RAM to actually run cargo build. Built the image on an emulator with more RAM then the target system, dropped the customized image on the SD card and booted right into the entry script.
Re: Is it time for a new Embedded Linux build system?
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does guix have any advantage here over nix?
I didn't know Nix had support for embedded systems. Where are the images defined?
What do you mean by image? In Nix you instantiate a NixOS system and specify the architecture. There are a number of tools to build a disk image from a NixOS system.
$ my-arm-system = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem { system = "aarch64-linux"; modules = [ ./configuration.nix ]; };
$ :b arm-system.config.system.build.images.iso