meta-nclawzero

Yocto layer for building minimal embedded Linux images with the ZeroClaw AI agent runtime and NemoClaw sandbox framework.

⚠️ Canary track — no stability claims

Current main is the canary track. Upstream-sourced recipes (nemoclaw-core, llama-cpp, etc.) use SRCREV = "${AUTOREV}" and pull whatever main / master of the upstream repo resolves to at the moment of the build. Every build is a snapshot of fast-moving upstreams; breakage between builds is expected.

This layer makes no claims about system stability, feature completeness, or fitness for any purpose. Treat every build as pre-alpha — a rolling investigation of what's in upstream HEAD right now, not a deliverable product.

A companion conservative track (see conservative/* branches) pins upstream-sourced recipes to the latest tagged upstream releases. Still not LTS-grade — no backport SLAs, no release promises — just pinned-to-releases rather than tracking HEAD, updated on a slower cadence than main. See STATUS.md for the full canary-vs-conservative model.

What it does

Pulls upstream NemoClaw and ZeroClaw at build time. Applies a small patchset (~430 lines across 3 patches). Copies overlay files (ZeroClaw agent definition, security tests, deployment scripts). Produces a flashable SD card image.

No fork. No copied upstream code in this repo. Just patches, overlays, configs, and recipes.

Targets

Machine	Board	RAM	Status
raspberrypi4-64	Raspberry Pi 4 Model B	2GB / 8GB	Primary
jetson-orin-nano-devkit	NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano	8GB	Planned

Performance

ZeroClaw on Raspberry Pi 4B (2GB):

• Daemon RSS: ~17MB
• Three daemon processes: <63MB total
• InvestorClaw skill (607 positions, 12 tools): passes full V7.1 test battery
• Available memory after boot: 1.4GB+

Dependencies

• Yocto 5.0 Scarthgap (LTS)
• poky (scarthgap)
• meta-openembedded (scarthgap) — meta-oe, meta-python
• meta-raspberrypi (scarthgap) — for Pi targets
• meta-tegra (scarthgap) — for Jetson targets (future)

Quick start

# Clone layers
git clone -b scarthgap git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky
git clone -b scarthgap git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
git clone -b scarthgap https://github.com/agherber/meta-raspberrypi.git

# Initialize build
source poky/oe-init-build-env build-rpi

# Add layers to conf/bblayers.conf, set MACHINE in conf/local.conf
# See conf/ directory for examples

# Build
bitbake nclawzero-image

# Flash
bmaptool copy tmp/deploy/images/raspberrypi4-64/nclawzero-image-raspberrypi4-64.wic.gz /dev/sdX

Layer contents

meta-nclawzero/
  conf/layer.conf                      — layer configuration
  recipes-zeroclaw/zeroclaw/           — ZeroClaw binary + systemd service
  recipes-nemoclaw/nemoclaw/           — NemoClaw + patches + overlays
  recipes-core/images/                 — image recipe
  recipes-core/packagegroups/          — package group
  recipes-connectivity/                — network configuration
  wic/                                 — SD card partition layout

Lineage

OpenZaurus (2002) -> OpenEmbedded -> Yocto Project

License

Apache-2.0