What can I do?

Personally, since discovering Yocto I am in love, I have learned by a mixture of books, google and doing. If you have an NI device, feel free to get started with this tutorial, I’ve also spent quite a bit of time with my raspberry pi 4 as a hobbyist too. There’s plenty of different variations if you google “Yocto raspberry pi 4”, feel free to contact me if you’d like to get some learning resources from me that I used or ask any questions.

Note: for a quick intro to yocto non-NI or my article, although I will add in more personalised experiences and error’s you might hit regardless like cc1plus: https://docs.yoctoproject.org/brief-yoctoprojectqs/index.html

So let’s get started onto the real facts, NI Linux RT is new(ish), it was released somewhere around 2015/2016 and we developed the preempt version of Linux in house for our RT.. You can find this out more at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J0y_usjYxo&t=12s and other Linux foundation video’s by NI.

That’s part one, the kernel is not your standard kernel, it drifted away back then at Linux version something like 4.9/4.11 and as time has advanced, it’s now very difficult to merge back (trust me, I’ve tried). We have kept up to date though, maybe not with our shipped versions as we want to use the most stable and tested but if you really want a version 5 kernel, you can find it on the NI github:

https://github.com/ni/nilrt

For now, let’s stick with the typical build and just get that working first before we go changing things (I’ll attempt it in future in many ways and document my experiences of course). So what is Yocto? Yocto is the build system that we use to develop our images, cross compilers and the whole thing. It automates it all and does it in a replicable manner (to an extent). It also has great caching ability to improve performance and is extremely flexible, working for almost any machine, kernel, you name it.

In this article we’ll start with a build, in the next article we’ll do now that we’ve got a good build we’ll build a random library we want to use with our hardware which may not have been there previously. I’ll also show pipoe as that’s a great tool for building python recipes, we’ll then install this using our homebrewed opkg feed and show what this was all worth.