0.1 A word of warning

A word of warning

The Morty and Pyro branch are experimental. Currently they build. install and boot, albeit the separate parts (u-boot, kernel and rootfs) need to be installed manually - this intentional, for now.

The only permanent change is the u-boot update, and that should not affect your ability to run your existing Edison Image. The kernel will be installed in a partition that is currently unused (the oversize OTA partition) and the rootfs on an external sd card.

The home partition is shared between your existing image and the new image. Remember that when you are doing destructive operations in the home directory.

Consider that the Edison allows you only to log in as root, and no root password is set. We all should know what can come of that. To secure the device, as a starting point you probably would like to create a user account, assign that sudo privileges, and configure sshd so that root logins are forbidden. This will still allow you to login via the console (the terminal connected via USB).

In case things go wrong, you can take the sd card, plug it in your computer (it is formatted as ext4, so under Windows that might not be so easy) and fix things from there.

If you really mess up the device, for instance by installing a broken u-boot (I did this), or break the u-boot environment variables in such a way that nothing boots, I provide the recovery tools and an image (but you can recover your own if you like). Note that recovery here means recover the Edison so that it will boot again. All the partitions will be wiped, so if you have anything important on the device, you might want to back that up in advance.

Nevertheless, you might find ways to break the Edison that nobody thought off. In that case, I told you so, and you get to keep the pieces.

With that out the way: the original Edison kernel has the same potential to break things, is badly secured and the image software is based on sources that is many years old (i.e. has many known security issues). At least Yocto Morty and later are being actively maintained. And the kernel applied here is for now not more than 10 weeks behind the latest official Vanilla release.