KDE Yocto Updates

Since I am planning to go on vacations very soonish (actually, just idling the time until I head for the airport…), I think it is good time to wrap-up the recent changes in the KDE Yocto area.

As you might have noticed, 4 weeks ago there finally was an in-person FOSDEM again. It was great event, many interesting people were there and I had really good chats. One of the main topics for me was discussing the next steps for our Yocto efforts, in particular as Volker and Hannah were also around.

Our current state is as follows:

1. meta-kf5 is updated the the latest KF5 release, 5.103.0. We plan to update that branch further as more KF5 releases appear. But it will stick with KF5 and KF6 is packed separately (see below).
2. meta-kde also got an update, but a much bigger one than meta-kde: here, you will now find KDE Plasma 5.27.0 as well as support for Yocto Langdale and all needed backports in the Wayland area to make it work with Kirkstone. I expect this layer at some time to switch to Qt6/KF6 support and at latest once I am back, there will appear a kf6-staging branch.
3. meta-kf6 is probably the most interesting point on the list. Following the Yocto project’s approach to have one repository per layer, there now is a new meta-kf6 repository. In this repository we use branch names that follow the supported Yocto releases to make it easier for device creators to pick compatible versions.
   This meta-kf6 repository now has an initial set of Git master hashes that are known to build regarding Langdale and scripting is prepared such that we can do semi-regular updates of the hashes as long as now official KF6 releases exist. Stressing the meaning of “Git master hashes”, please do not in any way expect that to be stable The only safeguard at the moment before updating the hashes is that we check that everything is building on Yocto Langdale. Currently, the main purpose is to catch packaging regressions early and support KF6 development with build fixes for more exotic setups.

Talking about “exotic setups”, I was very glad about the interested in our Plasma Bigscreen @ RISC-V/VisionFive2 demo at FOSDEM. All the WIP changes which were needed for this demo are finally landed in the KDE Yocto layers. There is only one remaining (very big) MR pending for meta-riscv which needs to get merged. The overall state of the board image though is quite basic and a lot of things are still to do (if you know Yocto and have such a board, help is welcome ) For example, RAM size is reported incorrectly from the Kernel, the screen looks too pink, GStreamer and Kwin does not want to work yet together with the GStreamer-OMX backend from Starfive…
Recreating my setup should be fairly simple, just use this manifest file, add meta-riscv with the branch of the above mentioned MR and do “MACHINE=visionfive2 . ./setup-environment && bitbake kde-demo-image-bigscreen”.