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by posborne 879 days ago
From my experience (from a few years back but still appears to be the case) is that Wind River is just wrapping Yocto these days. There could be value for some orgs where they don't have engineering teams if they do a contracting arrangement but I think, generally, orgs are better building directly on Yocto (or BuildRoot) without a vendor in the middle (other than your SoC vendor and their support layers). I'd save your money and pay for a seasoned embedded linux expert or three if you are maintained a connected product.

For smaller deployments, I think it makes more sense to look into solutions like mender.io, etc. for updates/fleet mgmt/etc.
1 comments
shiroiuma 879 days ago
>orgs are better building directly on Yocto (or BuildRoot) without a vendor in the middle

Going on a tangent here, but does anyone else also agree that BuildRoot is much, much nicer to work with as a dev than Yocto? I've had to work with both and BuildRoot was easy, just like building a Linux kernel with 'make menuconfig', whereas Yocto was downright painful.

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i_am_a_peasant 879 days ago
I worked with Yocto for about 8 years and about as much with buildroot.

They both get the job done but I find that yocto recipes are more tractable. You see clearly what comes from the main git tree and what patches a vendor adds on top.

I've seen some really ugly chimeras built with buildroot as a base..

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usr1106 879 days ago
Not a real expert with those systems, but I have used both. I believe buildroot is much smaller (as in much less binaries can be built) than Yocto. Yocto has its learning curve, but there is a lot readily available and you can do a lot more. It's extensible by desgn. You can build basically everything, but not without understanding the principles by just searching a few odd SO answers.

I have used buildroot for an initramfs. If you have configured a kernel before, you get going in an afternoon.

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dezgeg 879 days ago
The main problem of buildroot is the fact you need to rebuild from scratch all the time. Yocto has properly working incremental builds.

Yocto is definitely more flexible, which can be a curse as it gives architecture astronauts more chances to split up all the stuff it several repos and dozens of files.

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AlotOfReading 878 days ago
Yocto has a hell of a learning curve, but you also don't end up in situations where your build is silently broken on a regular basis.
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