“Yocto at Balena: Building ~70 Unique OS’es for IoT Devices” by David Tischler

At balena, we make use of the Yocto project to build unique OS’es for approximately 70 devices across the Arm and x86 single board computer ecosystem. Our resulting images, called balenaOS, include a container runtime and some tooling to connect to balenaCloud, allowing for remote management of the devices. Keeping up with just one BSP layer is hard enough, let alone the many Arm SoC families and their corresponding BSP layers that our customers make use of. Let’s talk about our use-case, the process we use to build and version these OS’es, chat about some challenges we face, and gather feedback from the community to improve the overall experience.