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Comment by deelowe | Hacker News Reader

The Edison is a great piece of hardware completely hamstrung by the idiotic yocto linux distribution and tool chain. Despite being "x86" it's near impossible to add custom drivers or rebuild the OS. What's the point of being "x86" if you can't make use of the ecosystem? The Rpi has much better support. Don't waste your time. Intel isn't serious about these products, can't be bothered to actually support them, and won't open them up for use outside of their walled garden.

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Hear, hear. I've tried on multiple occasions to use Edisons in my projects, and the tooling is awful. Intel's communication with the hobbyist community is even worse. It's hard to understand how there isn't an Intel-supported Ubuntu or Debian distribution for Edison.

Despite being "x86" it's near impossible to add custom drivers or rebuild the OS. What's the point of being "x86" if you can't make use of the ecosystem?

Edison isn't supposed to be a hub; it's a lightweight and specialized piece of hardware that can be customized to travel and explore and communicate high-load (poll-heavy) data gathering situations to a hub. Having x86 in octopus tentacles that can efficiently communicate with the x86 hub brain (which is where your heavy OS/custom driver code should be stationed) means you actually can make pretty good use of the ecosystem, and create projects that can get real-time data online quickly.

Darn, I got excited for a bit because I hated how I had to do a bunch of ARM nonsense to bring up my Pi gadget.

What's Yocto and what are they doing wrong?

I'd suggest Yocto is the de facto standard for this kind of embedded device. It's a bit complex behind the scenes but general building and updating packages is fairly straightforward.

Bringing up the edison is very easy. The bootloader supports DFU, so you can simply connect USB, reset, and flash the system images.

If you're coming at it from a higher level, it has a node.js and ssh services running by default, so it's easy to start tinkering.

Buildroot is good too and seem fairly simple. I used it for RPi project and comes with support for many boards.

Yocto is a bit like gentoo for exotic architectures. It allows you to create your distribution by cross compiling everything from source, and applying multi layered patches. It is a buildroot with steroids.

There's nothing with wrong with yocto itself, it's a build system which allows to create a custom Linux distribution.

It's the way Intel dealt with whole thing, that makes me cringe. It's poorly organized and unaccustomed to any serious changes.

> idiotic yocto linux distribution

Never used it, but from what I see on embedded conference talks, it seems to be widely deployed.

Indeed. In terms of getting a consistent system where you can pull in packages and drivers from different places while still being able to tweak everything in an embedded system, it's the best option out there. Not that it's a great system (bitbake, the meta-build system, is a bit of an arcane horror. If I were to reinvent yocto, I would use something like nix, which bitbake sort-of tries to be like but fails).

I can also mention buildroot [1] which seems to be a lighter, simpler project for this.

[1] https://buildroot.org/

Buildroot is harder to manage in my experience, yocto's layers are pretty killer in terms of seperating your code from vendor code. But yes, it's also an option.

How is it harder? It's a genuine question, not a rethorical one. Never used Yocto, but buildroot allows you to stack multiple filesystem layers on top the one produced by buildroot.

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