Yocto Vendor BSPs - The good, the bad, the ugly
- Anna-Lena Marx
- Embedded , Conferences
- November 6, 2025
Vendor Board Support Packages (BSPs) promise a quick start, but we all know the reality: a tangled mess of demo apps, weird custom tools, and an old, unmaintained kernel. This is a nightmare for products that need to live longer than a demo on the developer’s desk.
In this talk, we get our hands dirty. Forget the polished slides; we’re going to take a live, no-holds-barred look at some real-world vendor BSPs to see the common pain points firsthand. From there, we’ll discuss what we actually need from a BSP for a production device and explore the tipping point where setting up your own clean foundation becomes the smarter choice for building products that are meant to last.
Presented at
- inovex Meetup 2025, Karlsruhe, Germany
Related Posts
Yocto on the Edge - Unusual challenges when building not so embedded systems
- Anna-Lena Marx
- October 8, 2024
- Embedded , Conferences
Building embedded systems with Yocto on ARM platforms is a common practice, but when the products move further to the edge and become less “embedded,” new challenges arise. In this session, we will explore the requirements and challenges faced when developing Yocto-based systems for edge computing based on Intel.
We will dive into topics such as provisioning x86-based platforms, securely managing Linux user logins on a read-only root file system with enforced password changes, and implementing A/B updates together with secure boot. Real-world project requirements will be used as a guide to discuss practical solutions and best practices for addressing these challenges.
Read Post
Raspberry Pi für die professionelle Produktentwicklung - Eine gute Idee?
- Anna-Lena Marx
- May 10, 2022
- Embedded , Conferences
Maschinen und Geräte durch Vernetzung und Software aufzuwerten ist ein Kerngedanke des IoT. So werden die resultierenden Projekte häufig aus der Fachdomäne mit dem Wunsch nach schnellen und einfachen Erfolgen gestartet. Die Idee liegt dann nahe den beliebten Raspberry Pi als Basis zu nutzen. Das Gerät ist ja bekannt, fast alles wurde schon einmal von irgendwem gemacht und ins Netz gestellt. Klingt fast zu schön, um wahr zu sein - ist es auch aus professioneller Sicht. Die Gründe hierfür und welche Faktoren bei der Entscheidung für eine Hard- und Software-Plattform als Basis für ein IoT Produkt berücksichtigen werden sollten, sind Inhalt des Vortrags.
Read Post
Building Embedded Systems with AOSP
- Anna-Lena Marx
- June 30, 2023
- Embedded , Conferences
In our community, building embedded systems based on Linux, e.g. with Yocto or buildroot, is standard and well known. Considering Android, respectively the AOSP as a base system feels strange at the beginning as it is a huge ecosystem that implies high system requirements. Of course, embedded Android is not a solution for each issue. Nevertheless, the AOSP provides a sophisticated base platform which is packed with a
- modern UI stack
- robust media and camera implementation
- modern AI runtime
- well known abstraction between system and app development
- energy optimization
and lots of other helpful infrastructure.
This makes AOSP an interesting approach for building more complex embedded systems.