The OpenEmbedded project was created around January 2003 when some core developers from the OpenZaurus project started to work with the new build system. The OpenEmbedded build system has been, since its beginning, a task scheduler inspired and based on the Gentoo Portage package system named BitBake. The project has grown its software collection and supported machine set at a fast pace.

As consequence of uncoordinated development, it was difficult to use OpenEmbedded in products that demand a more stable and polished code base, which is why Poky was born. Poky started as a subset of OpenEmbedded and had a more polished and stable code base across a limited set of architectures. Its reduced size allowed Poky to start to develop highlighting technologies, such as IDE plugins and QEMU integration, which are still being used today.

Around November 2010, the Yocto Project was announced by the Linux Foundation to continue this work under a Linux Foundation-sponsored project. The Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded Project consolidated their efforts on a core build system called OpenEmbedded-Core, using the best of both Poky and OpenEmbedded, thus emphasizing an increased use of additional components, metadata, and subsets.