Mender blog

There was a very interesting talk at the recent Yocto Summit about how you can do debugging on hardware. Sergio Prado, a consultant and trainer from Embedded Labworks, explains how to leverage the Yocto Project to debug an embedded Linux system . It is a very impressive talk and this is something that we would really recommend that you look into. If you were going to do serious debugging on hard...

There are some special considerations if you want to get efficient Yocto development and your OTA update system. The most important is managing the time it takes to build the whole image when using the Mender client with Yocto. Even when making a one line change somewhere, it will take at least 2 minutes to get the new image. If your team is doing a lot of iterations to the image, then two minut...

Boards are often ranked based on the popularity of the board and we would rate that quite high in selecting something that's workable, that's going to have answers online, for problems that you're going to run into. Be aware of stability and power issues, and look carefully at Raspberry Pi in comparison to Beaglebone Black in this regard. The power source is a noted challenge in the Raspberry Pi f...

What should you consider in a provider for a Yocto OTA update? Your OTA software updates solution for a Yocto layer should be as non-intrusive as possible. This is a design principle that is front and center with Mender so the OTA software update manager should fit neatly into what you're building without being in the way. This will not always be the case with other OTA software update options...

You have to do OTA software updates for your Yocto image so what does the process look like? The first thing is deciding what kind of update you want. As a user you might tend to think immediately about RootFileSystem updates for operating the whole file system. This is a good choice for many. But not necessarily for all users. There are other kinds of updates that you can do, such as updating con...