Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by troubler 2390 days ago
I work with Yocto at my day job too. I hate it. I have 20 years of experience with Linux, and my favorite disto is Fedora. Fedora on arm is working much better than Yocto (except for DNF: 40,000 of available packages is too much for an embedded system, so at least 1GB of memory is required to run DNF).
4 comments

Buildroot at work. Someone told me yocto is the future so I spent a week with it but it was a nightmare. Went back to buildroot.

Gentoo is quite intuitive by comparison.

Fedora on ARM definitely works better than Yocto out-of-the-box. It's also much larger, and you don't have much control over the core components. You don't have control over how the packages were compiled, and you'd have a hard time reproducing your exact build later (especially if your flow includes a dnf update somewhere).

Yocto is the wrong tool if you're looking for a good developer Linux. It's a great tool if you're looking for a way to make a highly customized Linux image. It provides good reproducibility and strict license mechanisms to make sure you don't run afoul of anybody's open-source license. It also provides you with tools to compile and include your own recipes, and easy ways to modify upstream recipes without needing to fork the Yocto repos.

Fedberry is about same size as Yocto. Not a problem to customize RPM based distribution at all.
Yah, extra bonus because you can upgrade the system with dnf upgrade/etc. Unlike yocto where its a PITA and requires an engineer to validate it works every-time you need a security patch.

Yocto is just another "The S in IOT stands for security" kind of problem.

>Fedora on arm is working much better than Yocto

I concur. I've tried Yocto, was appalled by it. Then I've taken Centos 8, and it was a breeze to build for it, safe for some minor troubles.

I would choose Centos/opensuse/fedora/custom distro over Yocto anytime.