Yocto: Introduction to Yocto development

Introduction

The goal of this article is to provide basic information about the build and development process of Yocto for CompuLab boards. The article includes information about system, environment, operation system (Yocto) and development tools.

Yocto Overview

Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture (in simple words - it is hardware insensitive Linux version). The project provides flexible set of tools for embedded developers.

For more detailed and updated Yocto information:

• For extensive Yocto documentation see: Yocto documentation
• For introduction to Yocto see: Introduction to Yocto
• For Yocto build see: quick start with Yocto
• Comprehensive Yocto presentations at: Yocto Presentations

Making changes to Yocto images

Yocto is very flexible distribution, which gives wide opportunities for developers. To start making changes in it you need very few tools:

• Linux PC
• Bitbake tool installed
• Basic Yocto for Compulab image (also called meta-layer) downloaded.

Bitbake

BitBake is a generic task execution engine that allows shell and Python tasks to be run efficiently and in parallel. This is the utility used for building Yocto images.

• For Bitbake introduction see: Bitbake Introduction
• For complete Bitbake User's Manual see: Bitbake User's Manual

Recipes

One of the most convenient ways of making custom changes in Yocto meta-layer is adding kernel recipes.
Recipe is a fundamental object in Yocto Project which describes how to take a software package and build it for a specific target device.
Each software component built by the OpenEmbedded build system requires a recipe to define its components.

Detailed Examples

• Building Custom Recipes
• Making Changes to Yocto Meta-Layers