Mr. Tolman, how are you? I think you on mute. Oh, let me see. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, man. Okay. Hey, man, I'm doing good. It's good to see you again. Yes, sir. You too. So now Mr. Tolman, Chuck Tolman, I know you are a historian and for me, I'll preference this with I know history is kind of seen as subjective. And I know for myself as a black person, a lot of times I don't trust history in America just because I believe it was mostly recorded by white people. So you kind of, you know, rarely trust it. But I know there has to be a factual line like people who recorded the real just because of their own passion for the facts. And I know you study the facts and from talking to you, I know you don't have a personal bias and you really try to get the real facts and you research and you get to the root and you tell it as you find it. And so that's what I want to talk to you. Now here a little feedback. Do you have a speaker that's playing back or is that my speaker? I don't have a speaker in here. Okay, so it's just coming from your computer. Let me see. I thought I heard it like bouncing back, but I don't hear it right now. So so Chuck, let's start. I want this is women's history month. And my, my birthday is March 8 with it, which is International Women's Day. And 95% of my audience on YouTube are women. I would guesstimate it doesn't break it down by race but I would guesstimate maybe 70 to 80% are black women. And so I wanted to talk to you about from his, you know, historical perspective of take us back to when Africans were brought to America. And the role of a woman in that, like when we go back to the beginning, just tell me about that time when we were brought to America and then how what was a woman's role in slavery. Okay. So, of course, you know, there were European settlements before Africans were brought so the Spanish were down in Florida, since 1500s right, and so famously they have the 1619 project right 1620 project I can't remember what the number is but in about in 1620s, that's when they started importing African slaves in to do kind of other menial tasks to take it back a little bit. Europe and Africa had kind of collided a few times throughout history, most notably in like the 600s, the North Africans came into Spain, and they took that area over they were repulsive France and they took over and so they ran Spain for like about 700 years. And then they had was called the reconquista, which ended in 1492, which everybody who studies any kind of history should know that's Columbus right so after they repelled everybody out. Then they had to go looking for people to do labors and works so the Portuguese had started sailing around and they found that they could actually the Romans, the Carthaginians, you know people in Morocco, they had all been trading technology so there's a huge technological gap between this area of the world and Sub-Saharan Africa. So when these Portuguese come to Sub-Saharan Africa, which is like West Africa, Senegal, you know Congo that that area right Ivory Coast. They find people that don't have these great ships they don't have gunpowder. So they find that they have an advantage.  We need workers. Okay, so in Europe they had slavery. It was called circum there was other things around the world they had slavery so they were just trading. When they find this, this, you know, new world over here. They need people to work they first try what's called the incoming in the system. They try to use the natives, but the natives don't, they don't last they are not able to work that hard they, they, you know, they die from overwork. And so they find that one Africans are good at growing rights. They're used to it. So they start importing these people. And they bring them over here. Now they start with just the men because the men were the laborers right you know, then have strong bodies they're going to be doing all this work they don't really consider you know taking women but after a while. They realize that they need women one because now you can populate right so now you can kind of get more people are treating them like animals, right you don't want to just have bulls you want to have females so you can make more and more and more. And to it sounds weird but like companionship right if you have a family structure, you are less likely to try to run away and now you have to consider what's good for my family right so it's going to keep you rooted. Now this, this runs counterintuitive to what we find out later with slavery, which is that they would sell people off and they would try to, you know, do all this stuff but at the time it's like okay if you have a family here. You are less likely to create problems right we're seeing it now in Ukraine right so people are, you know the men are having to stay and fight. You know some of them are staying with their families but you know if you have the families together, you're more likely to acquiesce. Okay, so women are brought over for that role well. They're not brought over to do the hard manual labor they're going to do the indoor tasks they're going to start cooking you're going to clean up the people's houses they're going to do like needlework and knitting and things like that. But eventually what happens when you get to the southern colonies is that they have to do labor they do hard labor because the men get seen as more valuable. They get taught skills like masonry. You know, like, like kind of complex fishing things where they can make nets and things and go out there and do that. So that leads the women to do all to do like all the kind of work on the plantation. Then they, you know, want to make fences well they make the men go out there and chop the wood defense and the women are the ones sticking it in the ground and kind of compiling the fence. So what you get with this kind of weird, you know, amalgamation of all these different cultures because when they pick up African you look at his Africans, but they're not you have to think of them as separate countries right there's a difference between a Spaniard, and an English right, but you know the people from Ghana are different than the people from Namibia the people from Senegal, they're all different but they're forced to work together. And one thing that was very prevalent in Africa was that women when when they would work in their villages. The women would use the like the hoe they would like you know the men would clear the fields they would chop down the trees all that hard work.  Here they made the men do that and that was degrading to the plantation owners didn't care and they didn't know about this cultural thing but it was seen as like women's work. So the women were supposed to do the picking of the crops and the men were supposed to do kind of the manual labor they didn't think when we were able to do it, but over time, you start seeing if you look at old pictures of people working like plantations it's usually a lot of women out there those are the ones doing it because the men are out there, like being rented off for the day sometimes to do manual labor. When you go back and you look at a lot of documents, you know, like, if you were enslaved, you would basically be like kind of an employee or like a tool or something.  The plantation owner did. So he wanted to create more slaves and so kind of the woman's role at that point was to maintain the community at home because the men were constantly gone. That's kind of what their role ended up being. So, what's there a period where black women from Africa had to do hard labor, and did they have to take care of the kids. Always. In fact they were given extra duties, the one time that they were kind of given light duties while they were pregnant. Obviously the, you know, the plantation owner didn't want to lose the baby. I mean, you know, like one that's a human life to that's an investment right like that's, that's another person right you know you could sell them later or rent them out.  You know back in those days 1820s or so that said you know you want to space them out about every two, two and a half years. That way you don't like hurt the woman, you know that kind of thing so you want to keep them away you want to make sure that they're able to rear their child. So that, you know when a child about two and a half years old, wouldn't say take care of itself, but you know you don't have to constantly watch it two and a half year old you need to keep them in an area, but you don't have to, you know, watch them as much as you do like a, you know, an infant. They had to do everything on top of that and plus if they were working in the house they had to take care of like the plantation on his kids and all the other kids.  You know, I might have my kids live next door to me, right so they're all we're all sharing the same farm. We're all helping out now you got to take care of all these kids. You're the babysitter, right, you're you're in and that's why I think we see a lot of them get into education. It's like a natural thing. It's like, you have to, you know, you are good at nurturing all of these children. It takes a village to raise a child thing. That's like an African property right so that's built into the culture. Right so it's built into the culture of taking care of the kids, and they're naturally like you know, wanting a woman is naturally wanted to take care of children not looking at a child going forget about that right you know most men aren't either but a woman wants to do that so that's what they're given so they have to do this manual labor. I think crops were, you know, do fences I mean I don't know if you ever had to put a fence in a yard. I had to do it one time that's hard work right. And so they got to dig the hole and put all the stuff in there right it's terrible stuff they have to do that and watch everything. Like, and on top of that they got to cook and clean make sure everything's done. So, like, they had the burden is like if you're looking at like the most burden they've got. And that would be the black woman now is there is there a woman in that time period that had a burden as heavy as the black woman like was there was there Hispanic women and white women and Asian women that had a burden as heavy as the black woman. No, not, not in that sense, because if you go into Asia, they are highly mistreated there right but they're seen more as kind of just like owned property of their husband, they used to do something called foot binding. So, like, it was very desirous for when Asian women to have small feet in China, so they would break their toes and they would bend them in so they had small feet. That's like physical torture, but the amount of work that they're given they're seen as dainty they're not seen as we're going to do any hard work. Now when you get down into like, you know, Central and South America the women did work but it was kind of seen as shared labor plus they were not enslaved they were growing up in their own culture. So you know everyone had to do their job but here. Black people were treated as beasts of burden right they were treated like no more than really than an ox.    I mean that's why, you know, you get the blues out of the delta you know that's why all the songs are talking about you know I'd be so happy when the sun goes down. Like, this is hard life. There's a reason that you had to have enslaved people do it. It's because people that weren't enslaved would quit after a while they'd be like this is too much I don't want to do it. Right.   And was it the man cooking or the woman cooking. Um, I'd say it varied by region right so in New Orleans in like Louisiana you have a much different kind of slave culture like they were a lot more kind of free in certain areas to do this but what I would say is this generally speaking. You were allowed to kind of go fishing for your own food in fact it was encouraged, right.  So they grow pepper and they grow all of these other things and interestingly like barbecue, right. It comes from this modern world like the natives that were here, cooked on, you know, a thing called a can or sometimes called a barbacoa, which is where we get our turn barbecue, and they would use European style flavoring so if you look at. This guy who works at a, I think somewhere in Williamsburg or somewhere at a plantation that he does reenactments I think it's Mount Vernon yes, where George Washington had his, and he does this great like, like, enslaved people's versions of barbecue and it tastes different than ours because it's using European flavors. So the Europeans, the people that, you know, own the plantations, like mustard, like that came from Germany, right, and they like certain kinds of other things tomatoes and other stuff that they were used to having, you know vinegar, that stuff comes from there and they would mix in some of their stuff. Like okra right you know like that's an African dish, and so they would mix all of that in there but they would do mostly the cooking for themselves. And that's why they had better flavored food right because they would save all the good flavored food for themselves really I mean that that's that's one of the sneaky things that they gather would do for themselves. So they would make sure that they had the most pepper that they had this and that because they would grow it themselves and they didn't have to share that necessarily because you were kind of allowed to have your own garden you were kind of allowed to grow your own food and that's less of a burden on the whole plantation structure itself. So they were encouraged to do that and apply their own fish and do all that stuff and their food was delicious. And that's why the white people eventually started saying hey, let me taste that that's great and make that for me. That's why white people started like gumbo, and you know all of that stuff. Hmm. So, so it. So food kind of could have been a form of therapy. Food and music, to me, just as a historian looking at this, where the really only two forms of like expression and freedom that black people really could have that white people encouraged and enjoy right was food and freedom and you can look at it married today.  I go look for the red beans and rice right you know that kind of stuff is delicious right. There's a reason that we're eating Popeye's chicken eating good stuff like delicious flavored food right. And that's given to us by black people and then music. Don't even have to explain that to you right, no blues jazz hip hop all of that stuff right that's your form of self expression. There you go. And so, yeah, they're allowed to do it they're encouraged to do it and then people say this is great. Can you do that for me. I'll make you some, you know, some of this and that and so they'd have, they'd have barbecues but they feel like five or six hogs, they'd have all the other rich white people come in the area, and then they would you know proudly show off their enslaved guy who's a great cook and then say I got this guy, and they would hire him out right and he'd go oh I'm having this dinner.  So, now, do you think the men cooked or the women cook or was it both. Okay, I would say it's almost like today. I mean generally speaking, I haven't been to too many barbecues where a woman's doing like you know, like the big kind of meat thing right like I make brisket, my wife makes more of the daily dishes that thing right, but like when it's a barbecue it's like that's a man's thing you know that you ever see commercials it's always a guy holding that that's it goes back to there right the big stuff is a man's cooking. Like, but the women have to do the daily things they do the side dishes, you know they make the casserole, and they make this and that. You know, men did their own cooking, especially because a lot of times you have was like forage parties or stuff where they would go out hunting they might go for like a week of time like you take like 1520 men off the plantation, and y'all might go hunting.  And then the man, you know, this grandson might take it and do something with it, but I mean that's the same in most societies right like the women are doing the daily cooking. Now question for me how how is my internet on your now we missed a small part in the very beginning because I was trying to switch my internet. It was at the very beginning when you were talking about coming over from Africa, but how is my internet on your side and my glitching or is it. No. Okay, okay. Am I good. Perfect you perfect my screen a little fuzzy just because my internet is terrible with we're getting it switched over, but it was so being that this is women's history month. And I saw it on my calendar so that's what made me text you I knew it was like, you know, women's month but I didn't really realize that the whole month was like first day of women's history month is today. And so, in that line so we have black women in America, they are doing hard labor, they cook as well, they take care of their kids, they're having kids they're taking care of their kids. They're also taking care of some of the white kids.   Like where does this start to happen.  No, no, I mean no one should be shocked by this right. So they have that burden of just being treated as objects by anybody and you got rate you got kind of coercion.  And, and so it's really kind of impossible. If I'm being an honest historian right and not just doing some headline stuff. It's all, it's impossible to say in every single case that, you know, this person was raped and this was legitimate and this, it just depends on the people, right, you know a boss can have an affair with his secretary. And you could question that you could say well maybe the secretary love the boss maybe they did generally like each other. Maybe they were just you know like lustful right, or maybe she felt obligated to do that or maybe it was a mixture. Like you can't when it deals with the wise of history and historian can't really say, but what I can say is this. They weren't treated exactly as like sex robots, right like you must mate with these people that the idea that they were like, like purposefully put together like get this big slave and this one and make like that's that's not true. They were, you have to understand that even though slavery was terrible they were still trying to work within a framework of Christianity right so they would still have marriages.  Now you still are human beings so you might sleep around in the plantation people might sleep around that might lead to conflict, you know, like things like that would happen sometime like in New Orleans I'm doing a book now in New Orleans history, you, there was a lot of like slaves were kind of free in the city to kind of go and come as they please. And sometimes you'd have fights over the same women right you know and going into bars and stuff. So things weren't necessarily different the one thing you need to understand when it comes to history it's human beings have not changed in a million years. We still are basically the same kinds of people right we see a beautiful person we want that person right, you know, we fall in love all of those things people didn't really act that much differently, even behind the scenes they would still get it now as far as like the plantation with like the slave kind of thing. You could just have outright I mean I'm sure that happened, maybe the majority of the time, I don't know, because I wasn't there. But I mean you might have some instances where he got this woman is beautiful.     That's his son, sometimes, not always but sometimes they would treat the kid nicely.   Sometimes they would, you know, I've read a couple diaries, but they were talking about you know and then slave owner had a son and then son died of cholera. It was like a half slave, and they were torn up over it and their white wife furious.  The important thing when we're learning history is to not just generalize into all of this and all of that every human being is different.  So, are you being coerced. Do you really love this man.  That's that's good and see the reason why I was asking that is because I really want to understand, you know, the strength of women and particularly black women because they were a part of the building of America. And I'm at that foundational level, and I'm looking at today and I know like, you know, I hear women talking about being tired from driving the kids to school, you know, and coming back and doing laundry and washing the dishes and so when you think we're still humans. So I'm like, man, there was that these women as a human not as a robot were up at the crack of dawn. And if breakfast was a thing had to cook breakfast for her family.  Make dinner, and then after doing manual labor out in the hot sun. Then have a man climb on top of her to be impregnated and then sometimes that man be the master the master son the master's brother and or also her husband, or a man she could have been cheating with that's on the plantation. So, when I look at just the, the full day the full life of a woman at that time I'm like man. That's that's a heavy burden to carry, because I know just being a married man it's a lot of days my wife got a headache, and she did not have the whole field. On that day she is dead tired, and she did not have to do any work in the sun.  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So how does that where it originated with black women in America. Do you see that today like that that strength, like how do you believe it was passed down the strength or the culture or some of the things we see today. Like, do you believe there's a correlation with black women today being the number one college degree holders, I believe I read something that black women are receiving college degrees at a higher rate than any other demographic. Do you believe I something in 2021 is black women became entrepreneurs, higher than any other demographic. Do you believe there's a correlation of that strength that was born in the beginning that correlates to today.  And we're going to find a better way, you know, afterwards in New Orleans, the one of the things they do after a funeral is they play. Fly away. Oh, glory.  It's a glad morning when this life is over I'm a fly away. Right. And all the songs like I'm going to leave it's going to be great that's why they celebrate like in New Orleans they play the sad song on the way to the funeral right and on the way back to happy. The life of pain and labor is over. Now that that that also comes into you know just general, like kind of a peasant setting of like hard work, but like black women had it extra tough so they had to be hard.   No, it's hot. It's dirty. It's nasty. Talk about bathing they don't bathe every day. Sorry about that. They don't they don't bathe every day most white people didn't either it wasn't something you did all the time like everyone just kind of just is nasty man and dirty and horrible and now you got somebody that's out there and they want to do something and you don't want to do it but you can't really say no and it man it's hard but I do think that they see a way out. When slavery ends, they see a way out through education and you get a woman like, like fanny barrier wills who is just an amazing person.  And a lot of the early like black pioneers are, you know, are like women in education. You know, Bethune from Bethune football college here in Florida, you know, one of them right so they think look man, you know, I'd rather do mental labor and learn and teach people, rather than do this field work. Right so, you know, modern day we have like people from other countries come and do our field work is because as soon as people could stop they would because it's hard labor right.  They're going to complain the way through it. You know what I mean but like, they do it, they don't quit, there's a lot of different cultures in the world that will quit. And in another way to do it, or they will just stop.   Let me ask you a question, Chuck. And you still got a little time. Of course man. My audience used to like one hour long videos we had 33 minutes, and I know they mad that we missed that 30 seconds in the beginning. And I'm gonna have them put comments, you know in the comments section of other questions they have for you as a historian, because everybody does their own research in their own history so everybody thinks they know history but it's good to kind of bounce off different, different stories or different facts.  I'm a term.  And what they're talking about is really like, giving up on the black man, because of how black men treat them, which I believe is a lot of trauma that black men have just from history, and going to, in a lot of cases white men, and believing, you know and white men treating them better in, in modern times, as a white man, you know what do you think about that like, how do white men view black just generally speaking, you can't speak for every white man, and you know what's the real on that and do you and if a white man treats a black woman better, why would that be. All right. Okay.   Because you're supposed to be the knight in shining armor all of this stuff comes from like chaos. As far as like divesting. So, what I would say is just pick somebody you like. It doesn't really matter like, look at the person right I've got white friends that are men that have married black women right, completely fine I've got the reverse I got black men and married white women. And I've got you know you married black woman so like, I don't, I wouldn't say you know just go after the white man because you're going to, I mean, like, if you're just going for a guy you don't know what you're going to get what I would say is honestly pick it looks like they treat you well but not just you how they treat other people, because that's really more important right I love my wife I treat her well I treat my friends well I treat other people well. Right, but it has nothing to do with necessarily that you know my skin colors white. Now I was brought up in a world where like, you will get married right and you won't leave your wife, you know divorce is not a good thing divorce is quitting right some people just aren't made to be together. But it's like you should really find somebody that you love. Okay, I told my wife the third day I knew her said I love you we're going to get married we're going to have children and she didn't think I was crazy, which means she's crazy.   Those kinds of things that like okay you can't do this like you got to be, you know, a super player and I'm not saying that I didn't have my time.  First and foremost, this is a human being you're dealing with right.  We've been friends since high school.  I'm not going to advocate hey go ahead and say white dude, because we're going to give you flowers all the time and make you feel like whatever, because maybe not all of us will do that but you know what I would say is if they are feeling like black men are not treating them correctly. They need to not deal with the ones that are now, but when they have sons. You have got to teach them how to treat a woman, you cannot let them go out and be a player and do all this stuff, you've got to teach them how to treat a woman there's a song. And same thing with daughters right, you have to teach a woman self respect like I have a daughter, I'm teaching her you must find a man that loves you and treat you right do not let them mistreat you anyway. Okay, so I think that that somewhere I don't know where I mean as a historian I could probably look into that, but somewhere we went away from that. Since the 1970s divorces skyrocketed so this idea that every relationship is kind of 10 years every relationship is kind of. You know, like, you know, it could be temporary. We're here for there. People aren't looking for love so much anymore as they're looking for status of a relationship like hey I got this person I got this thing. I am valued this much this person values me this much you know look at my ring right like that kind of stuff and you know I would say that. I mean there's different kinds of white people so you know an Italian is different than an Irishman which is different than an American who's mixed of everything. You know, so like everybody's kind of got a different culture like Italians I know sometimes can be fiery, and they might you might see two Italian people arguing, and but they love each other.  And they look like they're kind of with but at the same time they're just going to go right back, go to the bar go to the gambling, you know place and do all that not listen to their wife. Okay, like, if you're not going to brow be adult men into changing who they are. Unfortunately, we are stuck the way they are but what you can do is help the future generations by, you know just emphasizing how you treat a woman. You know, like the crumbling of like the family is really kind of part of it because when you see like your mom and dad together and they love each other. Then you kind of get like oh like that's how it should be and if you're in a relationship and it's not like your mom and dad. You know this isn't kind of what I was used to but no people who parents have bad relationships tend to have bad relationships and I mean that's nothing new. I would just encourage everybody to just look at the person who you're talking to me because when you're dealing with white people you got to deal with a lot of stuff too. We got a lot of different cultural hang ups. You know there's a lot of issues obviously between black people like we've got to work out.  Right.  And you're going to be happier and like you're going to be like this.  And that could be a real thing and then sometimes I could also see where a white man could see a black woman and be like, I appreciate and love and adore your strength, and what you've overcome, and I respect that.  And so they get into a relationship and they don't really know how to be in a two parent home like how to make a relationship work because they didn't see it.  Well, what I would say is this European culture tends to put a lot of like if you look at our stories right if you were to take, because you mean you go to Africa and get the griots and you get their stories about that. A lot of European stories revolve around love King Arthur right he has a beautiful white point of view who cheats on him with his best night Lance a lot and people are like. And there's songs about that green sleeves is about you know unrequited love and it's all about love love love love love and that's put on a pedestal from just that cultural, you know representation. So that that takes place in our society. Other societies value different things right you know so what I would say is one interesting fact that I that I've kind of known for a while is that the statistically too most when I say loneliness but it's the people that are not married as much, you know or have partners on the planet are Asian men and black women. Right, as far as being single. Statistically, if you want to tell them to go find an Asian man he will love you and whatever if you know you know I'm saying so he will shower you with gifts and everything right, but that's because you know there's a lot of Asian women that that you know are desired by you know what go Asians right and so they're always like they look at some Asian girl, Nelly had a line like looking for a girl half black and Asian right, and it's like so you know like there's these things that are desired. But, but I wouldn't say you know just a white man is going to solve your problems. But, but as far as our culture like if we do have it, here's one thing I've noticed right and I was actually talking about our friend pop the other day about this. The R&B songs we used to hear growing up. There's not so many anymore. Right, remember like we used to listen to like, no no don't leave, don't leave me girl, like all of these songs and it was okay to have feelings. Like the 80s all these songs black men singing about I love you don't leave me. These songs are gone. Now it's all like, you know, going to the club or it's some like super emo rap stuff where they're like I can't trust nobody.  There's no more voice to men going to be cool, you know what I'm saying. Any of us who grew up kind of in the 90 or older people than us, you know, like, there's no more voice to men anymore, it's looked as lame right because now all man you're feeling about a girl, like somehow like, look, I'm not, I'm definitely not one of these people that's like super liberal, you know, kind of thing but I'm like not saying over map but we've gotten way over masculinized to the point where as a man, you're not supposed to be able to, to have a woman grab your heart and that used to be cool used to listen to blue songs they're talking about one woman left me and they love it you could feel their heartache. That's something we all got not everybody needs a gun and drugs. And I think that culturally we're kind of in a spiral because nobody wants to correct it. It's, it's, it's the, you know, the cool tough guys have run amok. And I think that if you can get back to those days, you might see, you might see a return to where you know, if they're having a problem with black men that they're able to express their love again right because they're trying to do it in text messages with smiley faces so no one can know and no one can see, long gone are the days you know we're like, you know smoky Robinson to sing and the temptations are you know, I heard it through the great vine and all that like, like, if you listen to the music, if you just want to know how culture is just listen to the music. Okay, start off with as much old as you can listen to the words and what they're singing about and watch it change over time. So we'll tell you about a culture more than anything. So, just listen to it man. That's all I got to say. Hey, that's how that's powerful. And I got a feeling that my audience is going to want to have you back so any questions they have that they want to hear, you know from a historian, they'll put in the comments and that's amazing and you said a mouthful about that music and so we'll do some, we'll do a talk about the history of music and the different and how it impacts culture and just the time so hey I really appreciate you. Chuck and so we'll from here we'll let the audience throw out some questions and I'll screenshot and text them to you and you can check this video out. I think I'm going to post it today at some point maybe around 4pm issue if I can get it uploaded. And y'all forgive me for the glitch in here. At the beginning I was trying to switch my Wi-Fi or something, but we'll we'll recap that too but thank you so much Chuck for your time. And I look forward to having another conversation with you. Absolutely man. See you dude. Let me stop.


Okay, just in case this is all a big mistake, Open Embedded builds Linux distributions for embedded containers, whatever. The Yocto Project is a Linux Foundation project that supports Open Embedded. This bof is about building Linux distributions. If you are not here for that, you can leave now and we won't. All right. Okay, the last time I had a bof, I had a fellow interrupt me and explain that I needed to cover all this stuff early on. If you want to talk to us after this, we're on IRC on Poundoe and Pound Yocto. We have mailing lists that you can find at the Yocto Project website. And we're looking, we know a lot of people use the Yocto Project, but we don't know who you are. So if you go to Yocto Projects.org slash users, it will steer you to a wiki where you can sign up and add your company products, pictures of products, links to products are great. I just saw Zephyr tweeted a slide with all the stuff that Zephyr runs in. And it would be fun to have a slide with people who will let us say, they run Yocto Project built images in their product. So that's my plug for that. And now we'll have the updates from Nico. Okay, so hi everyone. Yeah, a couple of updates. I mean, this is the bof, right? So we are just going to talk for a few minutes and then this is this weird moment where we are going to ask you for questions and we'll try to find people to answer them. So we'll see. So let's get started with a few updates. I mean, the usual updates about the members. So we've got some new members that sign up in, I mean, since, not since last time we've seen you because it's been a while, but recently. So BMW and Axis. One thing we've been doing lately and mostly because we haven't been able to meet in person is we've started this Yocto Project summits. We started with the first event and we've been surprised that it has been extremely successful. So we've done a third one and a third one and a fourth one. And it's actually always been a very successful event. We've realized that by actually going virtual, we managed to reach out to way more people that we have been able to reach in the past. And that is exactly, as Philipp was saying, one of the problem we have, we know the core developers, we know who are the people who have been talking to us for the last 10, 15 years, but we don't know who is actually using the project, who is actually struggling with using the project and everything. So this summit is that. That gives us, I mean, this reach to everyone out there. It's actually very inexpensive and very easy to join. So the last one was in May. It was a good event. We have nine hours of video. So if you don't know what to do this weekend, you know what to do now. The next one is already announced. So it will be November, at the end of November. And yes, so just make sure that you plan to attend.  We are going to request, I mean, people for speakers and we are going to look for speakers and everything as usual. This is something which is happening right now. As usual, there will be also developer meeting right after the Yachter summit for open embedded, which is a day which is slightly less formal than the summit where we can talk about anything. I mean, all the people using, developing, willing to develop open embedded technologies just can meet and talk about anything. And soon we'll have a wiki page set up for the developers meeting. So that we can try and collect topics so we can have a little bit of structure around the meeting. So think about topics you would like to talk about and these don't need to be super complicated in depth topics. I mean, sometimes just good questions, you know, new user experience. It's a good chance for people to talk to the developers. We don't have very good insight into how people learn to use the Yachter project and how to get started. Because most of us have been doing this for so long, it just seems natural to us. And we know we need to work on that experience. So we hope this week that there might be a force them again, like in a physical event. Last time there was a physical event, we had an open embedded workshop at force them, which was like, I mean, again, a bunch of people who care about OE just coming together, talking with speakers and everything. And that was actually great. Yeah, we have about six hours of video. So that's for the next weekend. So we do want, I mean, if that happens, we do want and we will try to have an OE event again. So again, I mean, we just learned about that yesterday. So we'll see. But if you want to help us with that, you know how to find us. But that could be a good way to meet again. Of course, we cannot talk about updates without talking about the next Yachter release. The one thing Yachter is good about is there is always a new release soon. We've been making a release every six months or the last, I mean, 10, 11 years. So 4.1 is expected next month, within the months from now. And yes, I mean, there is usual set of updates and improvements, I mean, update to the recipes. Something which is, I mean, significant updates. We have talked about rest for different reasons earlier today. But we also have seen some significant rest improvements in the core.  So for, finally, we have something that has been merged to actually allow, like a standard for how we are actually supposed to manage layers and more than just pokey. So we'll see, it's just the beginning. We want that to become the standard in the future and we finally merge something. Release will be out hopefully within a month or now. LTS, we started discussing talking about the LTS, I think three years ago. I think now we can say it's a big success, it's being used. I think we are going to even do a little game here, but yeah, Dunfell was the first LTS. In case you don't know, the York to LTS are supposed to be for two years. When we reached two years for Dunfell, there was like this idea that maybe two years was not enough. So we are doing an experiment to maintain Dunfell for four years. It does cost resources, money to actually, and it actually is a very big community for to maintain LTS. So we are doing an experiment with an LTS for four years, which is we are in this very old situation where Dunfell and Coxton are both going to be supported until the same 2024. We'll see what happens. Maybe the experiment will tell us that we should not do four years. Maybe it will tell us that we should do four years. So that discussion will happen at some point, I expect next year. But yeah, so this is a significant effort for the project. There are like a thousand changes every year now since we started just for the LTS. So we have a dedicated mentor for that and a lot of people are actually working on the LTS. So it's a significant effort from the project has been a lot of discussion to start it and I think it's a success. And maybe it comes with issues as well, but so far I think it's been a success, again. Okay, so we tried this on Monday and I used a very bad format. So I'm gonna try a new format. Who here is developing or maintaining products based on releases older than Dunfell?  So who here is maintaining products based on Dunfell? Okay. Who here is maintaining anything on Kirkstone? Is there anyone in between Kirkstone and Dunfell? Okay, so there are people not on the LTS in between. And how many people are building against master? All right. Okay, so a bit more variants. Sorry, what do you see? Master next? Who is using next? Okay, again, this is going to be a big discussion next year. What do we do with the LTS moving forward? And yeah, so I mean, we might actually, this is like kind of a little game today, but that is some idea. But yeah, we are going to have this discussion at some point, so. Yeah, all right. Okay, so one thing I actually like to do from time to time is to look at, I mean, okay, how are we doing and how many changes, how many developers and so on. So, and yeah, there is a little story I wanted to actually share today. So if we look overall, I mean, since a long time ago, what we see is that the project I've been fairly stable. I mean, blue is the, all the changes, the comments that we do to make a release and the yellow is what we do after the release or in the stable branches without many surprises. Dunfell is actually big in terms of the LTS.  So we have data recipes and every six months and it looks good. So now if we actually zoom a little bit and if we actually look at who is actually contributing to the core of the project and if we actually look at who is actually doing half of the work in the core of the project, what we see is a sign that, I mean, maybe we have like one problem that we see is that we have less and less people who are actually contributing to the core of the project. So in blue, this is like, how many people contribute 50% of the changes every year? And so what we see this year, we've reached the point where only four people have actually made 50% of the change in core. Is it a problem? Is it a big problem? Is it not a problem? I think it might be a problem. We know that some of the maintenance are actually way overloaded. And this is basically like something I wanted to tell everyone that you know. I mean, so we are looking for help all the time. We are always saying, Richard is all very often sending email and asking for help. What we see on the day to day can actually also be seen by just looking and doing some good forensics. So there is a sign, I mean, this is post COVID. So there are many different things happening. We will keep an eye on that, but definitely we need more people to help with the core of the project. We know that Yocto is used everywhere. We know that there are tons of very happy users that never complain because it just works. Maybe it's a bit slow to build, but that's the only complaint we hear about. But in the end, everybody can make product because the core is there and the core is maintained and the core improves. And this year, again, four people have made 50% of the change. In the red, it's how many people it takes to look at 80% of the change. And yes, so there is a trend in the last two, three years, which is not looking good. Now it's up to us to act on that, to think about that and to see how we can fix that. So we are going to look at how we can attract new members to participate and join the project, maybe found more developers, but we are looking at the current members who maybe spend more time on the core or we are looking at community members who also help with the core. So there are many, many things that can be done, help us, I mean, I think last time, I'd say that documentation is one place, one easy thing that people can contribute and help us with, but it's not just about the documentation, it's about the core. If you actually do these numbers for BitBake, I mean, the situation is even worse. BitBake, which is the core of the core. There are even less people who are contributing to it. Again, it's a signal that we see and we need to be aware as a community and we need to think about that and to see how we can improve this. We are very lucky, again, that we have many users and it's extremely successful, but we have to also look at what makes these projects so that we can keep being successful. So, if you want to start helping, one thing that comes in every box, so before you ask the question, we have a slide today. How do I start and how do I start contributing? Again, we have had this question a lot and I think Michael, who is with us today, has done a very good talk at the last Yachter Summit and we actually kind of ask him to do it. We wanted to have a place where we can send people, you want to start contributing, you want to find a mailing list, you want to know how to send a patch, you want to know how to join our community. There is a really good talk for Michael and this should be something that everybody wants to join us should actually look into. So, we know it's slightly difficult for new people to join. There are a few things which are complex with the Yachter BitBake Open Embedded, but in the end, it does complicated things, so you cannot do, it cannot be simple, but we are usually known to be nice people, welcoming people on emails, most of the time. So, yeah, we encourage everyone to join. So, that's what the story is we wanted to tell you. Now we have, I actually don't even know how much time we have. I think we have 20 minutes, 25 minutes. The usual format is that we're here, we are here to hear the questions and to find in the room who can actually answer the question because most of the time, we don't know the answers ourselves. So, if you have a question, say it out loud, we will repeat the question, I think we have to repeat the questions and then we'll find someone to help with the answers. So now this is the most important, oh, usually we have an issue with the first question. What is considered core BitBake? BitBake or Open Embedded Core, the documentation, I mean the Pocky, I mean Distro, which, yeah. I'm sorry, I forgot to actually repeat the question. The question was, what is the core of the project? So that's basically the Pocky Geetree, in a sense. Yes. How do I model that in a recipe? Okay, so. So there was a really good presentation today about S-Bomb. And so what you have in application and you want to know how you split your, how you can actually design the recipes where you're in application which includes multiple applications. So they know our defense because it does not depend on the delet recipe. But it's like the delet source code is part of the application's code base. Oh, you're gonna capture it? Yeah, then. So what I already do is like it's part of the licenses. That's fine. But how does it end up that in the S-Bomb? A, well, two answers, the first one is code. The other answer is the S-B-Dex code should be putting the Pocky in again first. So it will contain a map of all. This one really has the V source code in it. So you'll be able to see the bit to bit there. How will you then backtrack back to, and this is actually that live, not the process, that's the, just you walk out with it. Yeah, the other comment I would have is if you have something that includes the source code tracing back that you're using Zlib, isn't gonna be very helpful because you're gonna have the local copy of Zlib and that's the one you're gonna care about vulnerabilities in. So if there's a problem in the local one, I would expect it to be reported through the project that includes it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is definitely, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very good question for Joshua and some of the other S-Bomb people is what is the right thing to do in that case? Is that something you can bring on a mailing list? Do you think? Yeah, I can do that. Hang on, can you talk into the microphone? Yes, so there was a discussion about S-Bombs just happening today and the mailing list, so subscribe to it right now and jump in. Just one practical thing we have. Experts in that discussion. We have one more microphone here. I mean, it might just be simpler than just. I understand you're talking about something that's a commercial product or something like that, right? But in Fedora, in Debian, this is rendered, right? You've rendered your libraries, right? And so the general approach that I would take is actually to, as everybody's probably already hinted at, like, de-vendor that, right? So you want to actually use the Z-Lib or Z-Lib, sorry, that's available in open embedded and figure out if there's patches that are on top of that, right? So it might be a little bit more painful. Now it gets worse if it's a specific older version of Z-Lib. Yeah.  It's okay. So then what you do is you go and you look for, was there a version of that recipe in an older release of Yachto Project and then grab that recipe and make that recipe work? So you still get away from the vendor Z-Lib, but you're still building it with Yachto Project and you get all the benefits of that, but there's still a little bit of more work there because you might have to change the syntax to the release you're on and things like that. Or we find out what the right answer is for vendor code with respect to S-Bombs. Right, so there's the S-Bombs question, but also just in general, all of us are going to tell you to run away screaming from vendor code. It's a bad idea and the reason isn't because of the S-Bombs stuff, it's because of the vulnerabilities and security stuff. You're not going to find it. You're not going to be able to decouple that, exactly. You're not going to decouple that and you're going to end up with security problems in the future. But the question really was about the S-Bombs. Yeah, I understand. There may be something we can change to actually support that. I mean, so it works with S-Bombs. It's a great question, the S-Bombs people. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Oh, sorry. Who went first? Oh, what is this new workflow? The meta? Yeah, her. I mean, we don't use GitHub in the call. But you mean on Meta Open Embedded? Yep, probably yelling. That was Hem's thing, so Hem is not here. I don't think we can give a meaningful answer. It would be nice to have him on the phone at least. I'm going to digress. Oh yeah, it's not for the core. I want to digress a little bit because I've been meaning to say this all week is I very much understand people's desire to use a GitHub workflow. Richard is very married to using the email workflow because it's what it's used to and it's hard for him to change. I would also tell a story from the good old days when Open Embedded was running in BitKeeper and so we're dependent on a proprietary workflow which the GitHub workflow is proprietary. If Microsoft decides to chase everybody off to make money, we would have to change our workflow to something else. And I know that when BitKeeper closed to open source projects, you know, it was a year or so of bad times for Open Embedded because we had to find a distributed version control system very fast and it was not fun. That said, we are very interested in the conversation about does changing workflows, what workflows should we undertake, you know, given what I just said, how can we be more inclusive for developers as well?  And that's a very good conversation to have with us offline at the booth or things like that. And with changing the workflow address, the core developer issues, I mean, that's a good question, we don't know. Yeah. So for, well, we, Cam is the one doing that. I mean, so Cam for Meta Open Embedded is actually, sorry. Thank you. We need to get used to that. So the question was, so then at the last developer summit, we talked about using some GitHub based workflow and the question is, do we have results? I mean, do we have new people or contributors? Do we have way more developers because of that? So this is not used for the core, your core, it's being used for Meta Open Embedded and no, I mean, we don't have now, but this is a good thing. I mean, we should check. I mean, I can talk to Cam and see if we have data. Cam is actually maintaining Meta Open Embedded and is taking both pull requests or email. And so we can actually, I mean, I suspect it's going to be a lot more emails, but it would be interesting to see if the GitHub workflow is actually bringing new people. That would be actually an interesting data. So we can look into that. Yeah. I mean, the problem with using it for core is there's a lot of automation built up around emailed patches and the automation would have to be rebuilt to work with pull requests as well. In my personal opinion, if you want to introduce this GitHub style thing, you shouldn't be starting with GitHub. You should be starting with SourceHut because that was built from the ground to combine the web, the pull requests and the emails. And GitHub just isn't.  I mean, this is, it looks compelling. Like if you look at what Debian's doing, where now I mean, I think pretty much all the packages are on the same place, that looks compelling.  I mean, I don't know. I mean, this is definitely the thing that discussions that need to happen. But when we start saying you want to use GitHub or one of these web-based workflows, right? So now you're expecting all of us to review and contribute and comment in a place that we aren't actively using now, which means we have to do it in two places or three or four or 10, okay? The other problem is it's not just the vendor problem, is where is the history of all of this discussion? So mail archives are really, really easy to store and keep, but we are at the mercy of the vendors for the history of all the discussion and everything that happened there. So like a lot of communities use Slack as their chat, right? But if you're not using a paid version of Slack, a month goes by and you lose all the history. So there's problems like that that are the reality of why it's not an easy thing to do. But SourceHot may be the solution there because it's explicitly about email workflows with a web. And I think that's the viable way and GitHub isn't. But when we hear that people ask for GitHub, I mean like it has become the kind of digital place where I mean a lot of software is being done. GitHub is becoming like Xerox. Yeah, but again. Well, by GitHub what is meant is that how can I send a drive by patch quickly without subscribing to mail in this time? That's very useful, of course, but it doesn't have to be GitHub. Yeah, I believe he was next. Go ahead. It doesn't read head changes, which... Okay. It just might be like, if you ask around Roche with different vendors to change the piece as a package and not only Linux, Microsoft, everyone else, if I'm using GitHub, like if I rely upon the base core into the provider that these will be expediently changed like that would be put upstream, it doesn't need to really track that once that kind of flows. So what I'm gonna say there is if you know that there's a package... Can you repeat it? Oh, okay, so the question is, how rapidly can we make changes in the core in master when we see a problem like time zone changes in Chile? Or security, but someone changing their time zones and there being a bit of a rush to update things. What I'm gonna say is certainly raise the issue on a mailing list so we're aware that there's a problem because we don't have a lot of developers there that may not be familiar, but in general, the time zone stuff is gonna be in core and it's gonna be watched pretty closely in terms of how often does the automatic upgrade helper run? Right, so in master we twice a month run this auto upgrade helper that goes over every recipe and checks if there is a new upstream release and if there is then it tries to run DevTool upgrade on it and more than half of the time that succeeds and produces a patch that can be placed directly in master. And yeah, then it's on somebody, usually me, to actually do this and so for things like time zones the cut-ins is twice a month and then that gets back ported to Danville and other LTS releases or supported releases as well. Yeah, and if you're on us, a stable release, you might have to email the maintainer and ask what the status of getting the fixes back ported. Okay. And I mean you ask about TC, but I mean we also do that for CVEs and updates in general so we track the CVEs and per branch and everything. So this is a general cleaning work which is happening in the community, yes. So just really quick, as far as CVEs, the stable maintainer for the LTS releases, Steve Sakerman sends out an email every Sunday for master Danville Kirkston for the CVE checker report. And just recently we actually added the CVE check into the auto builder. So that checks actually also running on the auto builder. So if it's a CVE, we're going to catch it as soon as it's basically reported, right? We do our best to try to figure out if it actually applies and then we try to either fix the NVD database or take the patches to actually fix the component or do the upgrade. Now that mostly applies to master because master can take any kind of upgrades of any kind. So when you talk about the stable releases, sometimes it's a little bit harder because we're not going to do a major upgrade if it's not just bug fixes and security fixes, right? Because ABI breakage and things like that happen. But I'll give you an example, right? People were sending patches for Python. So we were on 3.8 Python and Danville and people were sending individual patches to fix CVEs. But by definition, 3.8.y Python is all only bug and security fixes. So I went in and actually upgraded us to newer minor dot releases because by definition it was, in fact, meeting our criteria, right? So just keep that in mind. And if you're looking to get involved, Steve Sackerman has a list of CVEs and Danville that need looking at. And he's running a competition now through mid-October where if you resolve CVEs and Danville, resolve the most CVEs and Danville between now and mid-October, he'll send you a pound of Hawaiian coffee that he grew himself. Now that could be a good place to get going. Say that again? Okay. There's some details. I would read the original email and not trust what I say. One point about this previous question is that those automated updates that are twice a month, the outcome of that is posted directly to open embedded core mailing list. And actually it was posted today. There was this 70-something emails from the robot. And if you want to see how this master version upgrades work, you should look at those, subscribe to the list and look at those emails. Okay, who was next? Who was next? Was it you or you? Yeah, I think it was him. I think I can take this. We should summarize the question. The question is about how to build images without GPL E3. Summarize. Right. So the modern way to do this is to restrict the GPL 3 to a specific product image, like the check that no GPL 3 is in the image runs at the moment when you actually do the image, but not any earlier. So you can build GPL 3 stuff to produce some native binaries. You can build GPL 3 stuff because it's a dependency of some testing packages that aren't actually going into your image, but this check you delay all the way to your specific image that is shipped to the customer. So that already eliminates a lot of issues. And then if you still end up with something like, for example, Bash into that product image with GPL 3, then you should look at what scripts do you have that are asking for Bash and try to take them out of the image or rewrite them in POSIX shell or there is find some way out of it. If it's a read line, this GNU thingy for having rich command line things, then almost everything has a package config that says disable read line and then, okay, you don't have read line anymore, but then you don't have the GPL 3 problem. So it's like targeted fixing until you arrive at the product image that has no GPL 3 stuff in it, which is don't even mention it. Hello. So I mean, should I repeat or should I not repeat it? So there was a comment about there used to be a meta GPL v2, but it is highly recommended not to use that anymore. So it's not supported and we do not want people to use that now. Yeah, and actually exactly in this conversation on the mailing list with facing others. Yeah, so the old way was that incompatible license was like a big project-wide prohibition and now it's been changed to be specific to a specific image. So use that. Okay. Thank you. Next. Because in the database sometimes you have very difficult conditions when the CV applies. So you have to have this package and this package or these packages last, maybe this configuration. Are those particular situations attract? Okay. So the question is, I mean, usually in the CV database, you have a complex situation where you have complex combination of, I mean, multiple packages being present to actually have a CV to be impacted. Does your support that? Yes. So basically it means a human being looks at that CV once it hits the fact that it's, that your act has been protected. So that means a human being looks at that CV. Once it hits the fact that it's, that your act has been flagged. Is that, is that CV affecting us? And then a human goes and looks at that and then makes the assessment. And then we either ignore a list or whatever the modern term is, that CV to say that it doesn't actually apply. Or we figure out where it actually does apply. Or we're getting, we're probably becoming pretty popular with the, the database that we actually help them improve their, the quality of their data to, to let them know when things, you know, really don't apply. So if it's super, super complicated like that, there's just no way we can automate that. So we, we're doing it a different way anyway. Yep. So the audience discussion is basically at some point it becomes a manual process to read the CVE and figure out the exact issue. I just, you have to take a look. So I think one minute to go, I was told we had three more minutes. So I guess we are, I'll just say we often usually look at like Debian or another distribution to see if they've already fixed and patched against that CVE or Red Hat or whoever. So, you know, that's, that's sometimes the easy way out. And that's a good way for you to help the project. If you find one of those, just send, send some patches in. Anyone last? Yes. Can you repeat that? How to reduce the build time? Okay. So, sorry. So, I mean, the short answer is shared state. So very often when we get this question, I mean, users don't use them, the downloads cash, the state cash, I mean, properly, but I think we talked earlier today. And I think you claim, you say that you are using it correctly and that you end up building home very often. And I mean, that is a very important situation where, I mean, it takes time.  But in the end, yes, I mean, we do spend quite a bit of time building. And everyone wants to find. And you want to say more about your use case or, and you use a state cash and that's it.  See, if you don't have at least 12 cores or 12, you know, like 24 threads, that's kind of a sweet spot. So you want to get to that. You want to get to enough RAM for about four gigabytes per thread at least. So if you're, you know, if you're looking at building it on a laptop, you're doing the wrong thing. Yeah. If you're still using spinning rest for storage, switch to SSDs. By the fastest SSDs you can, you can get NVME, NVME, sorry, NVME. Yes. Okay, so I'll just give you an example. I built a Ryzen system. It's got 12 cores. It's got two NVME drives and 64 gigs of RAM. And that builds just as fast as a 10 year old dual Xeon box. So, and it uses a lot less power. So, but if you're really talking at scale, you know, this is a very common question. And it's not a, not an easy answer for the, for everything. But the main, the main thing is to reuse S state. If you're doing it in Jenkins jobs, things like that, don't be, don't rebuild from scratch. Make sure you're reusing prior bills. Well, I would say that there should be a state infrastructure like a state server available to every developer in your organization. So that when things have been built before, then they can be taken from cash. And nobody has to build them again. And that's like an IT problem. So you need to talk to your IT I suppose and convince them that this has to be because it saves a ton of money. Sorry.  So we, we changed from auto ref to fixed hash and that brought built times down considerably. We also use started to use the hash equivalency server that brought But it can be that one package somewhere in the chain triggers it. Right. So you have to inspect it. It's not kind of easy. You have to look and find out what, what triggers your rebuild, what, what's causing the issue. Can be an option. Sorry. Look at the build history is going to tell you what's going to be the Yes. Take the build history, create the, the look at the graphical output. Find the, find the, the bottleneck. Yeah. Build stat. Yeah. Build stat is, is a tool that gives you, I mean, at the end of the bill. I mean, what has been building. And so that gives you hints about where to look for. I think we are out of time. We are, I mean, we are still here tomorrow. Maybe even this evening we have the Yachter booth where, I mean, many people are there. So if you want to talk more and to any one of us, you're free to come to the booth. Thanks everyone.