The Yocto Project 6.0, codenamed “Wrynose”, has just been released with Linux 6.18 LTS, about two years after Yocto Project 5.0 “Scarthgap” release with Linux 6.6 LTS. Over 240 contributors submitted over 4000 commits since the previous Yocto 5.3 “Whinlatter” minor release of the popular framework used to create custom embedded Linux distributions.
Yocto Wrynose is a Long Term Support (LTS) release, which will be supported until at least April 2030. The project’s developers especially highlight these 4 years of support, improved SBOM and CVE tracking features, and more secure defaults to ease compliance with the upcoming EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).
Yocto Project 6.0 highlights:
- Linux kernel 6.18 LTS
- Toolchain updates: GCC 15.2, glibc 2.43, LLVM 22.1, Go 1.26, and Rust 1.94.
- New bitbake-setup tool to fetch layers and setup build directories.
- Support for BitBake configuration fragments, which can be managed with the new bitbake-config-build command. This enables better reuse of build configurations.
- Easier to build with Clang by setting PREFERRED_TOOLCHAIN_TARGET and related variables.
- Over 300 other recipe upgrades.
- Support for building on Fedora 43, OpenSUSE Leap 16.0, and Ubuntu 26.04.
- The sbom-cve-check tool has been integrated to replace the cve-check bbclass.
- Improvements to SBOM generation, including initial support for PURLs and concluded licenses in SPDX 3.0 output.
- Several improvements to the new bitbake-setup tool, including sharing sstate between builds by default, support for upgrading layers while keeping local changes, clearer terminology & configuration files, and better IDE integration for VSCode.
- Systemd is set as the default init system. This change impacts nodistro builds and any distros not derived from Poky. The default init system for Poky remains sysvinit.
- TLS 1.0 & 1.1 support is disabled by default in OpenSSL.
- Updated host system requirements: 32 GB RAM and 140 GB disk space, mainly due to LLVM compilation requirements. (Yocto has already been resource-hungry; it once took me 48 hours to complete a build on low-end hardware, and the requirements have increased over time)
You’ll find more changes in the release notes, and the developers provide a migration guide for people on one of the Yocto Project 5.x releases. The source code for the latest version can be found on the releases page. The announcement indicates Yocto 6.1 will be scheduled in Q4 2026, and the next LTS release (Yocto 7.0) sometime in 2028.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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