OSS + ELC EU 2026

Many Yocto layers provided by silicon vendors prioritize vendor-specific tooling, demos, and opinionated decisions often at the expense of simplicity, flexibility and maintainability. This makes
them challenging to integrate for custom boards or to adapt to specific customer needs.

Additionally, some of those vendor-provided layers create a maintenance burden: when you need to update, you become dependent on the vendor's choices and changes, which are often hard to understand and follow.

In this talk, we'll examine common issues found in vendor-provided Yocto layers and show how they introduce unnecessary complexity into embedded Linux projects. Much of what new users perceive as “Yocto complexity” actually comes from the design and maintenance practices used in vendor layers.

We'll then introduce yocto-kiss as an example of a simpler and more maintainable approach to vendor support layers. The talk will cover practical best practices for layer design, common pitfalls to avoid, and strategies for building vendor layers that are clean, flexible, and pleasant to maintain.