Recommended Talks

Out of the entire pool of talks held during the two days, we would like to recommend a few:

For those who find themselves in the situation of having to debug applications on their target, two talks are worth a look: In "Leveraging the Yocto Project to debug an embedded Linux system" [video] Sergio Prado demonstrates ways to make debug symbols available on either the target or the host system and how to use them with gdb. He also notes how other build parameters like optimization settings can affect the debugability of a program.

Compared to this 'traditional' approach, a newer and very useful technique for accessing debug symbols and sources was presented by Dorinda Bassey in her talk "Using debuginfod with The Yocto Project" [video]. debuginfod provides a web server for finding and downloading debugging symbols on-demand and is integrated into Yocto with the debuginfod DISTRO_FEATURE for the target side and a helper script (oe-debuginfod) for the host/server side. A feature really worth being used!

In our personal experience, sooner or later, every Yocto user will run into situations where the result of some variable manipulation results are not what you expect. Why things are how they are, what to keep in mind and how to debug when running into certain issues, is all covered by Quenint Schulz' talk "Demystifying the OVERRIDES mechanism and Bitbake operators" [video]. We recommend this to newbies as well as to more advanced bitbakers. Or do you know exactly when _remove will be evaluated and how to undo it?

An interesting quick introduction into both the rust language and the meta-rust layer was presented by Steven Walter in "Using rust with bitbake and meta-rust" [video].

From the Hands on Lab series, we especially recommend Joshua Watt's talk "Multiconfig Inception" [video]. He demonstrates in detail how bitbake's multiconfig feature can be used to build multiple different configurations (such as embedded Linux, Zephyr or containers) in a single build run, saving time and reducing complexity. Results from one configuration can then be combined seamlessly into a final image.

OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting

Being more of a co-located event than actually strictly belonging to the Summit itself, the OpenEmbedded Developer Meeting (OEDVM) took place on the second half of the first day. It is a mix of recent and broader topics discussed by the core developers of OpenEmbedded, the actual build system behind the Yocto Project.

For those interested in what is going on, there is a publicly available topic collection in the OpenEmbedded Wiki.

Final Remarks

We would like to say thanks to the Yocto Project organization committee that made this event possible and to Trevor Woerner for moderating the entire two days and having an 'amazing' for each and every talk.

According to his closing remarks, there were 366 people registered for the entire event and thus way more than initially expected. They split up into 51,9% for the presentation track and 48,1% for the beginner class.

The next Summit will probably take place in September, maybe co-located to this year's ELC.

A final very important take away of the two days that we cannot withhold (as it was repeated so frequently): There is a fan shop available, where you can buy all the T-shirts, stickers, etc. you were not be able to collect from in-person events during Covid time!!: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/the-yocto-project/

See you in September, hopefully.