Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference + OSPOCon 2021

In the embedded Linux world, we've always had the ability to build the entire software stack from scratch, integrating multiple pieces and making sure it all works together. More or less we're using the same technologies over and over, tweaking as necessary to get everything working together. We're good at this, as evidenced by the millions of embedded Linux devices in the world. However, platforms built this way have little interoperability. Linux distributions struggle to support the large array of embedded compute platforms when every platform requires a different configuration. Custom builds from Yocto or OpenEmbedded often need extra porting effort to add support for additional hardware platforms. This is in stark contrast to the general purpose compute space where if you hardware cannot install an existing OS, you don't have a product! In this session well talk about how to gain the advantages of platform standardization, while still maintaining the flexibility and familiar tools needed for building embedded Linux topics. We'll talk about how to implement the Embedded Base Boot Requirements (EBBR) that is supported by U-Boot's reduced UEFI implementation, and demonstrate support for custom Linux builds as well as the major Linux distributions.