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Embedded Linux developer here as well.

As much as I grind my teeth with Yocto, it does make the process of generating a usable toolchain much easier than it used to be. Which makes the rest of it easier.

Up until a couple of years ago it was pretty much "grab what you can from CodeSourcery and cross your fingers".




i've found that:

* if all you need is a toolchain, go with crosstool-ng.

* if you want a toolchain and a bootable kernel with busybox and dropbear for a popular chipset, go with buildroot.

* if you want buildroot plus flexibility in every direction (at the cost of configuration pain), go with yocto.

* if you've outgrown even yocto, you're back to crosstool-ng and rolling your own build/bundle system.


For my current project I'm pulling the cross compiler from Debian and the libraries from Debian:armel. This doesn't work for every project, but it sure is easy when it does. I sure don't miss the days of building my own compiler and carefully crafting my root filesystem, but I know I can always fall back on that if I have to.




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