Building Embedded Systems with AOSP

Your Vendor's BSP Is Probably Not Built For Product Longevity - Now What?

• Anna-Lena Marx
• December 4, 2025
• Embedded , Conferences

Vendor Board Support Packages (BSPs) are the standard for bringing new silicon to market, showcasing features, and promising an “easy” start. However, for those of us building products with long-term lifecycles, these BSPs often fail to meet quality requirements. They can be overly intrusive and typically don’t separate feature showcases from the well-maintained base needed for product development. This focus on rapid demonstration frequently results in BSPs which are difficult to maintain, lack transparency, and are built on non-LTS Yocto and kernel versions, making them unsuitable for products expected to last 5, 10, or even 20 years.

Building a Yocto Pipeline with KAS, GitHub Actions and AWS

• Anna-Lena Marx
• November 29, 2023
• Embedded , Conferences

Using KAS makes handling Yocto Projects easy. By shipping its own container with all needed dependencies, building sophisticated CI pipelines becomes pretty easy - in theory, or when using Gitlab. But using GitHub as a code hosting platform with self-managed Action runners on AWS comes with a set of unexpected challenges.
Anna-Lena will talk about her quest through GitHub Actions, the Cloud and how to tame them. The talk aims to point the audience to the obstacles when building CI pipelines for the Yocto Project with KAS, GitHub Actions, and custom action runners on AWS and strategies to handle them.

International Women's Day - Why I wear Yocto Shirts on the Embedded World Exhibition

• Anna-Lena Marx
• March 8, 2024
• Personal , Embedded

Today, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, I’d like to give you an insight on working in Embedded as a woman: Why I’m searching for my best Yocto shirt and the nerdiest hoodie when I’m visiting the Embedded World exhibition.

Let’s go back some years to one of my first Embedded World visits. I was still a student doing my master’s degree in Embedded Systems. EW traditionally invites embedded students from all over Germany and adjacent countries on the third day, the student’s day. Together with some of my fellow students, I joined the trip and was looking forward to seeing new trends, talking to people, but also getting an idea where to apply for a job after finishing. At the exhibition, I started exploring together with some peers. Of course, all male. When going through the exhibition and talking to the people at the booths, I quickly recognized a pattern. The staff talked rather to the boys than to me. Mostly not quite obvious and probably not even on purpose. I think it’s about internalized stereotypes. They probably do not think that much about it, but obviously I was not a technically competent conversational partner to them at first sight, even if I asked the questions. I was an addition, an accompanying person from university or marketing. Mostly it was rather subtle, and I did not recognize it that much as the problem it was in the actual moment. But at some point we reached the Intel booth. I asked a question on something I was really curious about, and the male staff member started explaining to me and the accompanying students. During his talk, he started turning more to the boys until he showed me his back. I got a bit angry and told him directly that I would really like to hear the answer to the question I asked. Ok, bad, but human. So why am I telling this, and why do I mention Intel? Because I believe particularly such large companies should sensitize their employees working on a booth.