Qemu

TL;DR: bakar is a Python CLI that wraps kas and kas-container for Yocto Board Support Package (BSP) builds. It defaults to container builds via kas-container when KAS_CONTAINER_IMAGE is set, and falls back to plain kas on the host when it is not. Pass --host to any subcommand to force host mode. On top of kas, bakar adds pre-flight environment checks before the build starts, applies a curated tuning overlay (ccache, fetch mirrors, reproducibility knobs) without modifying your YAML on disk, writes structured per-run logs, and provides bakar triage to locate the failing recipe after a crash. For vendor BSPs that ship as repo manifests (NXP i.MX) or oe-layertool configs (TI Sitara), it translates those to kas YAMLs automatically. For projects initialized with bitbake-setup (the official Yocto 5.3+ workspace tool), bakar detects the workspace automatically, translates the JSON layer config to a kas YAML, and drives the same pipeline. Install: uv tool install bakar. ...

Three devices on my PC have firmware that can only be updated through Windows tools: an ASMedia ASM4242 USB4 controller (ASUS firmware utility), an NZXT Kraken Elite AIO cooler (NZXT CAM), and a Razer Kiyo Pro Ultra webcam (Razer Synapse). Every other component - NVMe SSD, motherboard BIOS, fwupd-supported devices - has a Linux-native update path. These three don’t, and their vendors show no interest in changing that. The obvious answer is “just boot Windows.” But I don’t have a Windows partition, don’t want one, and installing Windows to flash three firmware blobs is absurd. I needed a way to boot a fully configured Windows environment from Linux, run the vendor tools, and shut down. No permanent installation, no dual-boot, no repartitioning. ...