Nathan Drude

When starting a new project for an embedded product, one of the most important decisions you will make, in addition to choosing the right System on Module, is choosing the most suitable operating system (OS). Just as the foundation of a building determines its resilience and longevity, your OS choice can profoundly influence the performance, scalability, and ease of use of your final product. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to weigh the trade-offs and benefits of each.
 
In this article, we summarize the key features, advantages, and disadvantages of Yocto, Boot to Qt, Debian, and Android, for use as embedded software platforms in “smart products” designs. Our goal is to offer insights that can guide and help you make an informed decision when deciding the right OS for your embedded project.

By now, most engineers have heard of Secure Boot and the benefits of using it. However, after briefly reviewing the documentation, Secure Boot appears too complicated and time consuming and is set aside as a nice-to-have in the future. Does this sound familiar?
 
With Variscite’s integration of Secure Boot and Yocto, it has never been easier to enable Secure Boot on your Variscite i.MX8 based product. While manually building and signing your images outside of the Yocto build system requires many steps and creates opportunities for human error, using Yocto to automate signing your images saves time, is easily reproducible, can be distributed to many developers, and requires only a small configuration in local.conf.

One of the challenges when compiling Linux and Android based images, or any software, is setting up the proper build environment on your host computer. The environment needs to be reproducible both now and in the future. It also needs to be easy to distribute among team members at separate locations. It is a safe bet that sometime in your career (if not right now), you’ve had an old computer under your desk, or a virtual machine saved on your computer, that is used only for compiling software for a legacy product. To help solve this problem, Variscite provides docker containers for building Variscite Yocto, B2Qt, Debian and Android images. 
 
DART-MX8M-MINI System on Module

Variscite is introducing support for libgpiod, the new and recommended way for accessing GPIO from userspace. libgpiod was introduced in Linux 4.8 and provides both command line utilities and library bindings for C/C++ and Python. Variscite has added libgpiod support to all software releases starting from Yocto Dunfell, Boot2Qt Dunfell, and Debian Bullseye.
 
Previously, the recommended way of accessing GPIOs from Linux userspace was using the GPIO sysfs interface, which is limited and requires custom userspace libraries for higher level programming languages like C, C++, Python, etc.

Introduction
After designing a custom carrier board for a Variscite System on Module / Computer on Module, one of the first software tasks is to add support for new devices to the Linux kernel. This consists of: