The 1.4 release of the Freescale Community BSP had 19 contributors, from 9 companies, which were able to provide support for 19 board, 5 different vendors and is based on Yocto 1.4 release (dylan branch).

The BSP support many different SoC and currently support boards of i.MX23, i.MX28, i.MX31, i.MX35, i.MX51, i.MX53, i.MX6SL, i.MX6S, i.MX6DL and i.MX6Q SoC types.

In this text we will describe in detail how to use the Yocto project to build a system for the Boundary Device’s Nitrogen6X platform.

The Nitrogen6X platform is a development system based on Freescale’s i.MX6 processor (ARM-Cortex A-9). It provides many interesting features and connection options packed into the same board which includes a Quad-Core ARM® Cortex A9 processor at 1GHz and 1GBytes of 64-bit wide DDR3 at 532MHz.

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. It was founded in 2010 as a collaboration among many hardware manufacturers, open-source operating systems vendors, and electronics companies to bring some order to the chaos of embedded Linux development. It is hosted by the Linux Foundation as an open source project providing a vendor neutral collaboration environment, and encouraging community contributions in line with the best practices of the open source development model.

The Yocto build system is a powerful framework for cross-compilation which provides tools and data to drive the build process: from source code to the generation of images to be run on the target platform. The huge recipe set is up to date and it is maintained by the members of Yocto community and vendors which provide commercial support for it.

At O.S. Systems we use CHICKEN a lot. For a background, let us first understand what CHICKEN really is (copied from its website):

“CHICKEN is a compiler for the Scheme programming language. CHICKEN produces portable and efficient C, supports almost all of the R5RS Scheme language standard, and includes many enhancements and extensions. CHICKEN runs on Linux, MacOS X, Windows, and many Unix flavours.”

CHICKEN focus on practical applications of the Scheme programming language. It joins the simplicity and correctness of the language with the practical features required by real-world applications.

Most of the automated build infrastructure used for our embedded products is written in CHICKEN. It is also used in some products like O.S. Kiosk and others. It does fit quite well the embedded world as it has a very small footprint, offers a very good performance (the generated C code can be compiled to native code) and a rapid-development environment (besides the compiler, there are also other tools like an interpreter, a profiler and an extension manager). Thus, CHICKEN help us a lot to face the short deadlines and cost restrictions that projects using embedded operating systems usually have.

To make its use easier for ourselves, we have been working hard to properly integrate it onto OpenEmbedded. This has involved a lot of hardworking to properly understand all the details required to get it cross-compile the compiler, interpreter and also a bunch of available eggs (CHICKEN extensions). We have reached a very nice milestone some weeks ago with the public availability of our Meta-CHICKEN layer. It features CHICKEN 4.7.4 and provides a bunch of ready to use eggs that goes from OpenSSL support to a web framework (awful) completely written in CHICKEN.

So far, the use of it is now quite easy. You just need to enable the layer at your conf/bblayers.conf and it should work out of box.

We made it! O.S. Systems attended to ESC Brazil 2012 fair (26th and 27th of June) in São Paulo.

We used this opportunity to demonstrate our new services and products for the public and easy the communication with part of O.S. Systems team that were available to discuss possible projects and solutions. We launched, during the fair our SOM modules for Freescale i.MX family of processors, the O.S. MagicBox and provided a live demonstration of O.S. SDK so people could see it working and how easy it is to develop for an embedded system using it.

We’d like to thank our partners, clients and new clients that attended our booth and we look forward to meet you again in ESC Brazil 2013!

It has been a long time without change in our website. Even though the website was outdated, our team was working hard and some accomplishments are now public.

First the the new website; we moved from the Joomla content management system to a staticmagic based website with gettext translation support. The hacked code for it is available in our github account.

This makes our life easier to handle the content in multiple languages and our website will be always in sync in Portuguese and English.

We introduced some new areas in the website as this blog and some hardware products. We are offering a set of ARM SOM modules, baseboard and finishing the O.S. MagicBox product.

Please stay tuned in our blog and website as they will be much more active now

Regards,

Otavio Salvador