VIA Embedded has so far two Freescale i.MX6Q based products, the VAB-820 board and the matching AMOS-820 system. We have started to move from LTIB-based BSP images to Yocto recently for multiple reasons.
The first, very practical one is that Freescale and the community around it has moved onto Yocto for quite a while now. They are core supporters of the project, and we can see that that they are putting a lot of effort into it.
Second, connected reason is that we see the value very much as well, and want to make sure that both we and our customers can take advantage of the improvements. Yocto enables very interesting use cases, and should change quite a bit how companies are thinking about BSPs. It makes possible separating machine support and bootable image generation. A new product added to the existing code can take advantages of (hopefully) tried and tested OS images for specific use cases. Updating machine support (meaning mostly the kernel and u-boot) does not have to wait until a new version of the OS image is released, but can be developed parallel.
The good things also come with a steeper learning curve, though, both for us and for those who want to customize the generated images. To start learning, we have just released the beta version of the new BSP. It's still under development, but should be a good starting point.
What's your experience with Embedded BSPs? Do you use Yocto, or found something else more suitable for your workflow?
Some quick ideas: Probably the quickest would be to create your own working kernel git repo based on the available kernel and adding all the patches you'd like, and use that repo's address in the recipes to create your kernel. So make a repo that is Freescale Kernel + VIA patches + driver backports. This is as opposed to Freescale kernel + VIA patches alone as it is in the current recipes.
Also, a new BSP with 3.14 should be come out not too far in the future, and in that case no backporting is needed. There's an effort to upstream the VIA patches for even more compatibility, but there's no set timeline for that, just work in progress.
And just to note, in case of significant volume of hardware, we also provide ARM software engineering services for exactly these kinds of situations.
Hi imrehg
I am currently using the Yocto-based (v2.0.7, November 2015) BSP for the VIA VAB820 board. As it is based on Yocto 1.5, it uses kernel 3.10.17. The problem is, that I want to use a wireless mPCIe 802.11ac card requiring the ath10k device driver, which was added in kernel 3.11. For this reason, I would like to compile the latest stable backports (https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/projects/backports/stable/v4.3/backports-4.3-1.tar.gz) to add ath10k support. Could you help me doing a step forward? How would a backport recipe look like? Or how would I need to use/run a cross-development toolchain to configure (make menuconfig), build and install the kernel modules in the final image? I really tried a lot, but I can't get it to work!
I would really appreciate your help! Many thanks!
Thomas
Not sure at the moment, sorry. I know is that the engineering team is working on it, but I'm looking forward to it too!
Glad it worked, cheers!
Btw, do you know when the BSP beta will be replaced by the official release? Is it a matter of days, weeks, months? Finally, I will need miniPCIe and SPI support and I can't wait to get startet