How to use the Yocto Project to develop Embedded Linux
From IGEP - ISEE Wiki
The Yocto Project™ is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. Taken directly from the Yocto Project website:
Yocto Project™ it's not an embedded Linux distribution – it creates a custom one for you
The Yocto Project™ is an umbrella project covering a fairly wide swath of embedded Linux technologies an distributions. For example, the Angstrom Distribution is declared as a Yocto Project Participant
Much of this How-To is extracted from different sources. If you would like to read some of the original articles or resources, please visit them and thank the authors:
- The Yocto project website ( http://www.yoctoproject.org )
- The Yocto project documentation ( http://www.yoctoproject.org/documentation )
- The Openembedded website ( http://www.openembedded.org/ )
Contents
[hide]Overview of How-To
This How-To is meant to be a starting point for people to learn build and run Yocto-based images for IGEP Technology devices as quickly and easily as possible.
Why use the Yocto Project™
Because it's a complete embedded Linux development environment with tools, metadata, and documentation - everything you need. The free tools are easy to get started with, powerful to work with (including emulation environments, debuggers, an Application Toolkit Generator, etc.) and they allow projects to be carried forward over time without causing you to lose optimizations and investments made during the project’s prototype phase. The Yocto Project fosters community adoption of this open source technology allowing its users to focus on their specific product features and development
Build Platform Setup Environment
In order to build an image with BSP support for a given release, you need to download the corresponding BSP repository. At this time latest stable branch for IGEP devices is denzil.
$ git clone -b denzil git://git.isee.biz/pub/scm/poky.git
Enter to the poky directory,
$ cd poky
and clone the meta-isee layer.
$ git clone -b denzil git://git.isee.biz/pub/scm/meta-isee.git
$ source oe-init-build-env
Having done that, and assuming you downloaded the BSP contents at the top-level of your yocto build tree, you can build a igep image by adding the location of the 'meta-igep' layer to 'bblayers.conf'
Add below line into .../poky/build/conf/bblayers.conf:
<path to>/poky/meta-isee \
To enable the isee layer, add the 'igep00x0 MACHINE' to .../poky/build/conf/local.conf:
MACHINE ?= "igep00x0"
You should then be able to build a image as such:
$ bitbake demo-image-sato
At the end of a successful build, you should have an image that you could use for boot device from flash or a micro-SD card.
Extending the available packages with others layers
You can append more layers to your environment in order to build more packages, in following wxample you'll download the meta-openembedded layer. In your poky directory
$ git clone -b denzil git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
Add the layer into build/conf/bblayers.conf:
<path to>/poky/meta-openembedded/meta-oe \
Now you can build any of the new packages added, for example:
$ bitbake postgresql
Create your own Linux image
TODO
Yocto 1.2 'denzil' documentation
Official documentation
- Yocto Project Quick Start: This short document lets you get started with the Yocto Project quickly and start building an image.
- The Yocto Project Application Development Toolkit (ADT) User's Guide: This manual provides information that lets you get going with the ADT to develop projects using the Yocto Project.
- The Yocto Project Board Support Package (BSP) Developer's Guide: This brief document defines a structure for BSP components. Having a commonly understood layout encourages standardization.
- The Yocto Project Development Manual: This Manual provides an overview of the development process for images and user-space applications.
- The Yocto Project Reference Manual: This manual is the complete reference guide to the Yocto Project, including the Poky reference system which contains a worki
