Embedded Linux Yocto Project™ Announces Compliance Program, Releases Joint Roadmap with Long-Term Support Initiative

Enea, Mentor Graphics and Wind River among first to demonstrate compatibility for project that standardizes on common tools and offers interoperability throughout embedded Linux space

SAN DIEGO, Calif., {LinuxCon and CloudOpen} August 29, 2012 – The Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation Labs project, today announced its new Compliance Program. The Program aims to support companies and individuals who want to deliver implementations of the Yocto Project and to contribute to its ecosystem by standardizing on tools that offer interoperability among all stakeholders in the embedded Linux space.

The Yocto Compliance Program defines a minimum level of standardization that results in the ability to use a “Yocto Project Compatible” badge product packaging and marketing materials, denoting technical interoperability. This allows semiconductor and board manufacturers, hardware makers, consultants and developers to be confident that a common set of technical requirements for the Yocto Project are implemented in product or project development, reducing cost and fragmentation across the entire embedded Linux ecosystem. 

In addition, the program defines guidelines for the use of a “Yocto Project Participant” badge that enables individuals, open source projects, small business and other organizations to demonstrate their commitment to collaborative development and Yocto Project build tools. 

Enea, Mentor Graphics and Wind River are among the first companies to be Yocto Project compliant. Early Compliance Program Participants include Enea, Huawei, Intel, Mentor Graphics, MontaVista Software, OpenEmbedded, OpenSDR, Sakoman, Inc., Texas Instruments, and Wind River.

“The Yocto Project brings together the elements needed to make the embedded Linux development process much easier and faster, and this Compliance Program further accelerates that work,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “We expect this Compliance Program to help advance embedded Linux development efforts and to contribute to the platform’s rise in this growing market.”

To reduce fragmentation, the Yocto Project provides developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. It is a collaborative, open source project that provides templates, tools and methods to help developers create custom, embedded, Linux-based systems, regardless of hardware architecture. The Yocto Project Compliance Program will further advance the commercial benefits to industry stakeholders who are building products on top of the Linux-based Yocto Project.

Compliance as defined by the Yocto Project governs the rights for the usage of the project name, logo and marks in association with products, marketing materials and announcements. Some of the acceptance criteria include demonstrating the following:

• Hardware support, configuration policy and recipe meta data are separated into different layers that do not depend on each other
• Visible contributions to the OpenEmbedded and components projects of the Yocto Project
• Are an open source project, nonprofit or member of the Yocto Project
• All patches applied to BitBake and OpenEmbedded-Core have been submitted to the open source community
• All layers contain a README file

For more information on how to comply with the Yocto Project, please visit: http://www.yoctoproject.org/branding-compliance-guidelines

The Advisory Board of the Yocto Project includes Gold members Intel, OpenEmbedded, Sakoman, Inc., Texas Instruments and Wind River. Silver members of the Advisory Board include Enea, Huawei, Mentor Graphics and MontaVista Software.

Yocto Project and LTSI of Consumer Electronics Workgroup Announce Joint Roadmap

Linux continues to dominate in embedded development and consumer electronics. The Linux Foundation provides a forum for a variety of efforts focused on work to support that growth and advance the platform to meet technical requirements in this area. 

Today, The Linux Foundation Labs Yocto Project and the Long Term Support Initiative (LTSI), a part of the Linux Foundation’s Consumer Electronics workgroup, are announcing their joint roadmap. LTSI provides for both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two years.

The next Yocto Project release (scheduled for October) will include support for the Linux 3.4 kernel release, which will be the basis for the next LTSI kernel release. The Yocto Project v1.4 release, tentatively scheduled for the first half of 2013, will support the LTSI 3.4 kernel, as well as the most recently released mainline Linux kernel version. Subsequent releases of the Yocto Project will maintain this regular cadence of supplying recipes for both the most recently released mainline Linux kernel and the most recently released LTSI kernel.

This work will result in further alignment across all areas of Linux development for embedded and consumer devices, accelerating technology advances in this area as well as time-to-market for equipment manufacturers.

For more information about LTSI and how to get involved, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/consumer-electronics/ltsi-overview

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2000, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linuxconferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linuxresearch, Linuxvideos and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linuxtraining opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. FollowTheLinuxFoundationonTwitter.

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