Yocto Project 6.0 "wrynose" is out — and I contributed!

2026-05-13T12:00:00+02:00

The Yocto Project 6.0, codenamed wrynose, was released on May 13, 2026. This is the new Long-Term Support (LTS) release, succeeding 5.0 "scarthgap". I am happy to have my name in the contributors list for this release, and I wanted to take the opportunity to write a short overview of what is new.

If you are migrating from 5.0, make sure to read the migration guides for the intermediate releases: 5.1 (styhead), 5.2 (walnascar), and 5.3 (whinlatter).

Major component upgrades

The toolchain and core components received significant version bumps:

Linux kernel 6.18
GCC 15.2
glibc 2.43
LLVM/Clang 22.1.3
Python 3.14.4
systemd 259.5
Go 1.26.2, Rust 1.94.1
QEMU 10.2.0
U-Boot 2026.01

Over 300 recipe upgrades in total.

Rust in the Linux kernel

One of the most significant additions is first-class Rust support for building the Linux kernel and out-of-tree kernel modules:

A new kernel-yocto-rust class adds the required dependencies to build Rust components of the kernel.
A new module-rust class supports building out-of-tree Rust kernel modules. A skeleton example is available under meta-skeleton/recipes-kernel/rust-out-of-tree-module.
Enabling Rust in the kernel is now as simple as adding rust to KERNEL_FEATURES in a recipe that inherits kernel-yocto.

Security improvements on by default

Several security and hardening features that were previously opt-in are now enabled by default in the nodistro setup:

security_flags.inc — adds security-related compiler and linker flags.
no-static-libs.inc — disables most static libraries.
uninative — allows reuse of native sstate built on one distro on another, also enabled by default now.
OpenSSL now disables TLS 1.0/1.1 by default.

New SBOM and CVE tooling

The CVE analysis and SBOM generation story got a major overhaul:

A new sbom-cve-check class replaces the old cve-check class for post-build CVE analysis of images. It uses the new python3-sbom-cve-check tool internally.
A new sbom-cve-check-recipe class allows CVE analysis at the recipe level, without building the full software.
SPDX 2.2 support has been dropped; the project now supports SPDX 3 only.
New variables SPDX_INCLUDE_KERNEL_CONFIG and SPDX_INCLUDE_PACKAGECONFIG allow exporting richer metadata into SPDX documents.

BitBake and tooling improvements

bitbake-setup received a lot of love in this release:

Non-destructive update behavior: local commits and modifications are preserved during bitbake-setup update.
Shared State is now shared between builds by default (SSTATE_DIR and BB_HASHSERVE_DB_DIR set in site.conf).
VSCode configuration files are now generated by default.
The unpack_update() function allows updating a Git repository in-place.

WIC is now an external project

The WIC image creator tool has been extracted from OpenEmbedded-Core and is now maintained as a standalone project. The recipe in OE-Core now builds from this external source. A new wicenv image type was also added.

devtool IDE integration

The devtool ide-sdk command saw several improvements:

gdbserver attach mode support.
GDB pretty-printing for C++ STL types.
Kernel module development support.

What's next

As an LTS release, wrynose will receive long-term maintenance. If you are on scarthgap (5.0), now is a good time to plan your migration. The migration guide is available at the Yocto Project documentation.

Tprrt's Blog - Embedded Linux