Mender introduces support for Yocto 6.0 Wrynose LTS

Announcements
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The wrynose branch of meta-mender has been released. Wrynose is the current Long-Term Support (LTS) release of the Yocto Project (Yocto 6.0), succeeding the scarthgap (Yocto 5.0) LTS. With this release, the kirkstone branch of meta-mender reaches end of support and is no longer maintained.

Default component major versions changed

meta-mender selects the default version of each Mender component automatically when you don’t pin one. With the move to Wrynose, two components now default to a new major version:

Component Previous default (scarthgap) New default (wrynose)
mender-connect 2.3.2 3.0.0
mender-gateway 1.2.1 2.0.0

If you build images without pinning these, you will automatically pick up the new major versions. To stay on the previous series for now, pin the version explicitly in your configuration, for example:

PREFERRED_VERSION_mender-connect = "2.3.2"
PREFERRED_VERSION_mender-gateway = "1.2.1"

All other Mender components keep the same default major versions as on the scarthgap branch.
Visit Supported releases for an overview of supported Mender component and subcomponent versioning.

Updated bootloader and build integration

Bringing meta-mender to Yocto 6.0 involved a number of compatibility updates. A few worth knowing about if you maintain custom recipes or .bbappend files:

  • U-Boot updated to 2026.01, including refreshed Mender integration patches and updated boot-environment handling.
  • GRUB integration consolidated on the 2.12 precompiled images; legacy precompiled builds have been removed.
  • As of Wrynose Yocto release, Poky is now distributed as separate openembedded-core and bitbake repositories rather than a single combined repo. If you maintain your own bblayers.conf, double-check your layer paths against the current Yocto setup - meta-mender layer has been updated accordingly.
  • Recipes have been migrated from WORKDIR to UNPACKDIR to follow the updated Yocto source-unpacking model. If you have custom .bbappend files that reference ${WORKDIR} for source or installed files, you will likely need to update them to ${UNPACKDIR}.