With the release of version 1.3, the team at the Yocto Project has added a number of developer-visible features to its embedded distribution builder. First announced in October 2010, the open source collaboration project (a Linux Foundation workgroup) is aimed at device builders. It provides templates, tools and methods for developers to create Linux-based systems for various embedded systems and processor architectures such as ARM, MIPS, PPC or x86.

Yocto Project version 1.3 includes the first major release of AutoBuilder for automating build tests and QA, and enables support for EFI in the GRUB installer for the first time. The terminal user interface has been updated to make it easier to see tasks that are currently executing. The developers also point out that the Hob GUI-based build system, first introduced in version 1.1, has had a large number of usability improvements to its UI.

Among the included component upgrades are version 3.4.11 of the Linux kernel, GCC 4.7 and the 2.16 release of EGLIBC, an embedded variant of GLIBC. Other changes include improvements to the BitBake Commander plugin, a "significant cleanup" of X Server recipes and the addition of support for producing a companion SDK together with an image. Additionally, the SDK can now be relocated and mirror handling has been updated to better handle errors.

A detailed list of updates and new features, as well as a list of known issues and open bugs, can be found in the release notes and on the Features wiki page. Updated documentation, including a migration guide, is provided. Also known as Poky 8.0 "Danny", Yocto Project 1.3 is available from the download page.

See also:

Yocto and OpenEmbedded get together, a report from The H.

(crve)