Open IoT & ELC 2017

Dell ported the Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (IDRAC) from a home-grown embedded Linux build process over to Yocto starting in 2012. We now have 3 generations of products using the Yocto infrastructure and a large number of developers maintaining the IDRAC codebase. One of the major problems we ran into during this effort was that every time we upgraded from one Yocto version to the next, we would typically get a few dozen or more package build failures split between our added open source packages and our Dell source code. We’d also get many new compiler warnings and errors in our code that we would have to address. Here we present a solution to this problem that eases the transition between Yocto versions in the development environment. Dell has successfully used this method over the past year and a half to upgrade through 3 Yocto releases, and it can work for everybody.