This is wonderfully timed, I’m currently looking for options when it comes to doing firmware updates on Linux based IoT devices. Does anyone have any recommendations?
I can't speak to their quality as I haven't tried it yet. I have used Resin.io quite a bit and it's great if it fits your use case (and the pricing model makes sense for you).
They have an all in one operating system perconfigured for a raspberry pi or intel nuc dubbed "hass.io" that uses ResinOS under the covers:
https://home-assistant.io/hassio/
Under the covers, ResinOS is a minimal Yocto embedded linux + docker + some ota stuff. Consider looking into that before building your own.
Definitely going to do some digging into Yocto and Mender though.
The Yocto Project is a popular build system for your own embedded Linux distribution.
Mender integrates with the Yocto Project with a layer (https://github.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender), but is a separate project for end-to-end OTA, which includes the client and the management server. Both are licensed under Apache 2.0 thus it is freely available and you're not locked into a hosted-only backend.
Although this is an older blog post, here is how you can port the Mender client to a non-Yocto build system: https://mender.io/blog/porting-mender-to-a-non-yocto-build-s...