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.

As an open source project, the Yocto Project operates with a hierarchical governance structure based on meritocracy and managed by its chief architect, Richard Purdie, a Linux Foundation fellow. This enables the project to remain independent of any one of its member organizations, who participate in various ways and provide resources to the project.

Why use the Yocto Project? It’s a complete embedded Linux development environment with tools, metadata, and documentation – everything you need. The free tools are easy to get started with, powerful to work with (including emulation environments, debuggers, an Application Toolkit Generator, etc.) and they allow projects to be carried forward over time without causing you to lose optimizations and investments made during the project’s prototype phase. The Yocto Project fosters community adoption of this open source technology allowing its users to focus on their specific product features and development.

The Yocto Project provides resources and information catering to both new and experienced users, and includes core system component recipes provided by the OpenEmbedded project. The Yocto Project also provides pointers to example code built demonstrating its capabilities. These community-tested images include the Yocto Project kernel and cover several build profiles across multiple architectures including ARM, PPC, MIPS, x86, and x86-64. Specific platform support takes the form of Board Support Package (BSP) layers for which a standard format has been developed. The project also provides an Eclipse IDE plug-in and a graphical user interface to the build system called Hob.

EMAC offers Qt as an optional User Interface application framework on many of our Linux systems. With Qt, developers get a polished and efficient user interface with IDE support, C++ APIs, example applications, and cross-platform capabilities. EMAC can provide Qt libraries configured for Qt/embedded, which utilizes the Linux framebuffer directly, or Qt/X11, which makes use of an X11 server for rendering.

Android is a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablet computers. It is developed by the Open Handset Alliance led by Google. Google purchased the initial developer of the software, Android Inc., in 2005. According to the Android project “The goal of the Android Open Source Project is to create a successful real-world product that improves the mobile experience for end users”.

Android consists of a kernel based on the Linux kernel, with middleware, libraries and APIs written in C and application software running on an application framework which includes Java-compatible libraries based on Apache Harmony. Android uses a virtual machine with just-in-time compilation to run dex-code (Dalvik Executable), which is usually translated from Java bytecode. The main hardware platform for Android is the ARM architecture, however recently there has been support added for x86 from the Android x86project.

Anyone considering using Android should realize that using Android in Embedded Applications adds a layer of complexity and inefficiency that may not make sense for many User Interfaces in the Embedded arena. However, if the unit is an battery backed Industrial Tablet or similar mobile device Android may be a good fit. Application programming is typically done in Java although C can be used with some difficulty.

EMAC can provide Android (Gingerbread, Ice Cream Sandwich or Jellybean) for several of our products. Call for further details.

EMAC has been offering Xenomi Real-time operating system “RTOS” extensions as an option to our EMAC OE Embedded Linux distribution.  Xenomai is offered as one of many optional off-the-shelf Linux modules available for our distribution. EMAC, can also provide custom Real Time Drivers and Application assistance if required. Additionally, EMAC provides a Xenomai SDK plug-in to our IDE for program development.

Xenomai is a Free Software project in which engineers from a wide background collaborate to build a versatile real-time framework for the Linux© platform. While Xenomai is a real-time development framework cooperating with the Linux kernel, in order to provide a pervasive, interface-agnostic, hard real-time support to user-space applications, seamlessly integrated into the GNU/Linux environment.

The main project goal is to help migrating industrial applications from proprietary real-time systems to Linux.

Xenomai is about making various real-time operating system APIs available to Linux-based platforms. When the target Linux kernel cannot meet the requirements with respect to response time constraints, Xenomai can also supplement it for delivering stringent real-time guarantees based on an original co-kernel technology.

Originally named Xenodaptor, the project that would soon become Xenomai was announced on August 2001 by Philippe Gerum. The Xenomai 1.0 milestone was reached in March 2002.

In its early days, Xenomai used to be an add-on component to real-time Linux variants for emulating traditional RTOS, originally based on a dual kernel approach. Over the years, it has become a full-fledged real-time Linux framework on its own terms, also available on single/native kernel systems.

Adeos/I-pipe are companion projects to Xenomai, which implements a key component of a dual kernel configuration: the interrupt virtualization mechanism delivering high priority events to the Xenomai co-kernel with short and predictable latencies. Xenomai was the first real-time extension to be ported over the I-pipe, followed a year after by RTAI.

In the 2003-2005 period, the original core team members – namely Gilles Chanteperdrix and Philippe Gerum – contributed significantly to the RTAI project, before focusing back on Xenomai’s own goals, which led to the release of Xenomai 2.0 in October 2005.

Since then, Xenomai 2 has been actively maintained and ported to various CPU architectures, for a user base mainly involved in the industrial automation industry.

The Xenomai 3 architecture introduces a paradigm shift, as users are no more tied to the dual kernel configuration enabled by the I-pipe, but may run the real-time APIs and their applications transparently over a single kernel configuration as well.

EMAC provides a Free Eclipse IDE that is pre-integrated to provide everything the user needs for developing applications. All the compiling, converting, and downloading inherent to development can be done from one easy to use high level interface. The distribution provides an SDK which contains source examples for the LCD with Touchscreen, Digital I/O ports, SPI, SD/MMC, and Audio.

The EMAC Eclipse IDE is a powerful, yet flexible Integrated Development Environment and even features SVN version control support. For a screen shot of EMAC’s Linux Eclipse based Development Environment click here.

EMAC products can use EMAC’s standard Linux Modules including the Xenomai Real Time, Php, SQLite and Lighttpd web server modules. For a listing of optional modules see our Embedded Linux Operating Systems Page.

Xenomai is a real-time development framework cooperating with the Linux kernel, in order to provide a pervasive, interface-agnostic, hard real-time support to user-space applications, seamlessly integrated into the GNU/Linux environment.

EMAC will be incorporating Xenomai into it’s mainstream distribution in the near future to create accurate periodic user space tasks with sub-ms periods. Linux users are provided with several examples of an easy to use interface, which communicates with the boards I/O through generalized hardware classes.

For more info on Xenomai click here

For more information on our EMAC OE 5.0 Features.

For more information on our EMAC OE 4.0 Features.

Custom Linux builds with additional packages, customized packages or custom software installed are available upon request.