Designing a distro from scratch using OpenEmbedded (Koen Kooi, Linaro) - OpenEmbedded makes building a distro really easy, but there are no examples of how to design and build a general purpose distro from scratch. The Yocto Project documentation only deals with changing an existing distro, Poky. Supporting binary package feeds, with clean upgrade paths as well as supporting multiple devices bu using more than one BSP layer is really hard to get right.
As part of the 96boards effort and the new IoT group Linaro has created a collection of reference distro configs and scripts to use them. The use of multiple distros instead of making an existing distro incompatible with itself by e.g. changing from X11 to wayland or from glibc to musl is a much wanted change.
If there's time left the issue of generic machines will be discussed as well.
Koen is the lead developer of the Angstrom distribution, a core developer of the OpenEmbedded project. He works for Linaro as the release manager as his day job.