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Your OS Decision Matters

At Embedded World 2026, Pierluigi Passaro, Variscite’s R&D expert, spoke with Robert Thompson from NXP to discuss two forces accelerating a shift already well underway in embedded product development: ongoing component supply chain pressures and the Cyber Security Resilience Act. As long-standing development partners, Variscite and NXP continue to advance their collaboration around the i.MX 9 processor family – helping product teams reduce complexity and bring differentiated products to market faster.

Choosing your SoM partner starts with understanding manufacturing models

Project Overview

In industrial applications, the GUI (Graphical User Interface), also referred to as an HMI (Human Machine Interface), acts as a bridge between users and machines. It is only through GUIs that operators can monitor, control, and interact with complex industrial processes and applications. Well, you may say that the role of GUIs is the same everywhere; however, the most significant difference between an industrial and consumer product is that of safety concerns. Mistakes in industrial software can have a much greater impact compared to mistakes in consumer products.

In today’s evolving embedded systems landscape, selecting the appropriate Linux can significantly impact your project’s success. While various options exist for creating embedded operating systems, we’ll focus on two powerful contenders: Yocto and Debian. Understanding their distinct characteristics and capabilities will help you make an informed decision and make the choice best suited to your application’s requirements.

Sold under brand names like Arduino, Udoo, Raspberry Pi and others, hacker boards increasingly are serving as the foundation of technology projects found in IoT, wearables, robotics and portable devices. Starting as low as $15, these boards are part of a new manufacturing trend supported by a community of hobbyists and DIY developers that use low-cost hardware components and open-source software to create mini-computer platforms. As they move up the ecosystem from a hobbyist device to handling more advanced, commercial applications, are hacker boards an economically viable option or a costly mistake?
Here are the factors that lead SOMs to be a better value than hacker boards:
• Support – professional and fast support helps shorten development time and ensures the product will continue to function as designed. Variscite has in-house professional support provided by the R&D team in addition to an extensive frequently updated online documentation center vs. hacker boards that rely on contributions from community forums for troubleshooting.

When selecting a System on Module (SOM) provider, ISO 13485 certification offers significant advantages that extend well beyond its medical device origins. While ISO 9001 is common in the SOM industry and provides a general framework for quality management, ISO 13485 adds crucial layers of control and validation specifically developed for medical device manufacturing – layers that benefit any project requiring high reliability, not just medical. Where ISO 9001 focuses broadly on customer satisfaction and continuous improvement, ISO 13485 implements more rigorous requirements for risk management, documentation, and process control throughout the entire product lifecycle.
Systematic Risk Management: Preventing Issues Before They Occur
ISO 13485 places a strong emphasis on risk management throughout the product lifecycle. In medical device manufacturing, these enhanced requirements ensure thorough validation of component changes. For example, when modifying a SOM’s firmware, each change undergoes comprehensive risk analysis and validation before implementation, preventing potential safety issues.

Adding a splash screen to your product enhances the user experience by confirming successful display initialization, providing essential visual boot feedback, and delivering a professional brand presence. It creates a polished appearance and reassures users that the device is starting correctly. 
U-Boot for i.MX 8M Plus lacks native LVDS support, as of Yocto Scarthgap 6.6.23_2.0.0. However, NXP offers an out-of-tree patch that enables LVDS functionality. Variscite’s added patch extends this support to both the DART-MX8M-PLUS and the VAR-SOM-MX8M-PLUS System on Modules. 
These patches have been added to meta-variscite-bsp-imx:

When starting a new project for an embedded product, one of the most important decisions you will make, in addition to choosing the right System on Module, is choosing the most suitable operating system (OS). Just as the foundation of a building determines its resilience and longevity, your OS choice can profoundly influence the performance, scalability, and ease of use of your final product. With so many options available, it can be overwhelming to weigh the trade-offs and benefits of each.
In this article, we summarize the key features, advantages, and disadvantages of Yocto, Boot to Qt, Debian, and Android, for use as embedded software platforms in “smart products” designs. Our goal is to offer insights that can guide and help you make an informed decision when deciding the right OS for your embedded project.
Note: There are typically additional considerations that are not listed below, and developers will also have differing opinions. What follows is a high-level summary of the pros and cons of each option.