In preparation for the BSP discussion at today's OEDVM, the following background material may be helpful.  Comments on BSP patterns, anti-patterns, incentives, constraints and other topics are welcome in this mailing list thread, so they can be organized ahead of the 30-minute session.

BSPs: carrot versus stick

14:20 Crofton: How many use vendor BSPs? (show of hands) ~30%

Andrey: Most fixes are not pushed back to the vendor BPSs.

Scott: AGL is not prepared to get input via the layers

Jan-Simon: That’s not really the case.

Richard: Would it help if the BSPs were Yocto compatible?

It should not change anything just when including the layer.

Consensus: that would help.

Mark H: Yocto compatibility is one part of the problem, the other is that the BSPs do not use the version of the kernel that he wants.

Jon: The vendors also do not support old kernel releases in the Ubuntu-variant images.

Mark A: They are also covering multiple boards with the same release, so the kernel is trailing.

Richard: The compatibility program has not been pushed as hard as it could.

Mark H: The layer index should show if a layer is Yocto Compatible.

It should also be stated clearly what kernel version the BSP layer supports.

Andrey: That would make it harder for the users.

Marek: These BSP are more like a tech demo.

Josef: They are also shipping arbitrary .bbappends.

Jan-Simon: They cannot enable all BSPs at once. Friendly layers would help. Isolation is key. If they ship libc-headers, it will break a package feed.

Richard: linux-libc-headers is just for building the libc, don’t use it for anything else.

Scott: Some vendors with the bad BSP are yocto project members.

William: The tools for checking compatibility have gotten a lot better.

Scott: Koen has been talking about this for years.

Richard: meta-oe doesn’t pass compatibility with Zeus right now.

Mark H: Wants to use the linux-yocto recipe, for fragments and moving to a different board.

Josef: There is a How to setup a BSP layer, and how to create a kernel recipe.

Paul: The documentation on how to build a clean BSP layer is not understandable by the usual BSP builders.

Mark H: The layerindex should show a checkmark for Yocto compatible layers.

Mikko: Some vendor BSPs are not public.

Mark H: Money speaks.

Jan: Many vendors say that their BSP is just for evaluation purposes.

Ndec: setup Google Analytics on layers.openembedded.org (and probably openembedded.org)

Scott: we should run the existing checkers on known layers

Marco Cavallini: Are there rules to submitting layers to the index?

Some review, check that it’s reusable for other projects (yocto compatible)

Crofton recommends to run yocto-check-layer (especially BSP layers)

Richard: the layer-index can find problems easily which are not detected by check-layer

Mark Hatle: Machine and distro checking works well

Richard: check-layer uses the sstate checksums to verify that a layer affects only things that it should touch (machine/distro level) when enabled