Yocto Project Aligns Technology with OpenEmbedded and Gains Corporate Collaborators

Project gains momentum as the OpenEmbedded Community and an increasing number of companies collaborate to build Linux for variety of chip architectures

SAN FRANCISCO, March 2, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that the Yocto Project will align with the OpenEmbedded community to advance embedded Linux. The Linux Foundation today is also announcing a variety of new companies that are participating in these embedded Linux efforts.

The Yocto Project is merging technology with the OpenEmbedded community and extending governance to include OpenEmbedded representatives. In addition, the projects are planning to share a common OpenEmbedded Core consisting of software build recipes and core Linux components, preventing fragmentation and reinforcing the OpenEmbedded methodology as an open standard for embedded Linux build systems.

The Yocto Project is a Linux Foundation workgroup announced late last year to help develop open source, high-quality technology that helps companies make custom Linux-based systems for embedded products, regardless of hardware architecture. The OpenEmbedded community, founded in 2003, is focused on building a common build framework for embedded Linux.

“The Yocto Project and the OpenEmbedded community bring together the industry’s key stakeholders from the embedded Linux community to build a core set of technologies to advance Linux for the burgeoning systems and devices market,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “This kind of massive collaboration is exactly what makes Linux the driving force behind today’s new technology innovations.”

An annual survey of embedded developers conducted by Embedded Market Forecasters reported in 2010 that the two primary factors that contribute to choosing an embedded Operating System (OS) are cost (44.6%) and availability of source code (33.1%). These drivers are contributing to the explosion in demand for Linux. But until now, deep customization and hardware options were limited without a huge investment on development.

“The open source Yocto Project brings together the elements needed to make the embedded Linux development process easier,” said Philip Balister, Vice Chairman, OpenEmbedded Board. “We’re happy to be working with the Yocto Project and believe it can advance Linux development efforts for embedded systems and devices.”

“Linux is huge in the embedded market because it can be adapted for any application, but it isn’t always easy to get started with a custom design,” says Grant Likely, Linux kernel developer, Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) member, and president, Secret Lab Technologies Ltd. “I’m thrilled that OpenEmbedded and the Yocto members are working together to make building custom Linux systems simple and reliable.”

“Linux is paving the way for the future of computing and embedded computing is at the very core of that future,” said Steve Sakoman. “The Linux Foundation and its members are accelerating this future by bringing open source communities together on a common set of goals. The alignment of Yocto and OpenEmbedded is one big step towards that future.”

New Companies Pledge Support for Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded
The Linux Foundation, the OpenEmbedded community and participating companies in the Yocto Project recognize that collaborating can bring together a variety of upstream sources to ease embedded Linux development. Companies contributing to the project today now include Cavium Networks, Dell, Freescale Semiconductor, Intel, LSI, Mentor Graphics, Mindspeed, MontaVista Software, NetLogic Microsystems, RidgeRun, Texas Instruments, Tilera, Timesys, and Wind River, among others.

Supporting comments from these companies can be read here.

The Yocto and OpenEmbedded community will be meeting at The Linux Foundation’s Collaboration Summit and Embedded Linux Conference in April. For more information on these events, please visit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org. Embedded Linux training opportunities will also be available at these events: http://training.linuxfoundation.org. For more information about the Yocto Project, please visit http:/www.yoctoproject.org.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, 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 Linux conferences, including LinuxCon and generating original Linux research 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 Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.