Ever since I have been sending out weekly change logs, I have been impressed by the consistent amount of development activity in the OpenEmbedded project. Every week there are consistently over a dozen developers making changes. Developers come and go, but the contribution level always seems healthy. While this amount of development leads to some amount of churn and issues, this amount of development is also required to keep pace with all the new developments in the OSS space. Not having to wait 2 years for the next big release is one of the big advantages of using Linux and OpenEmbedded. Having access to the latest technology provides a competitive advantage for many products, and makes dealing with the occasional issues that come up an acceptable trade-off. Coupled with a flexible and consistent build system, OpenEmbedded is the vehicle to build advanced products. Yes, its hard. Yes, you better budget for some system software development time. Yes, you should get some help if you’re not an embedded Linux expert. Yes, you can start with some canned vendor “BSP” that seems to work and is seemingly the low-cost way to go, but eventually you’ll hit a brick wall where you need some bit of functionality that is not there, and then you’ll start up the exponential curve of dumping lots of time into trying to make something work with little progress forward. It is much better to count the cost up front, and do things right.
OpenEmbedded development activity
- by Cliff Brake