Embedded Linux Development With Yocto Project Sample Chapter

Embedded Linux Development with
Yocto Project

Otavio Salvador
Daiane Angolini

Chapter No. 1
" Meeting the Yocto Project"
In this package, you will find:
A Biography of the authors of the book
A preview chapter from the book, Chapter NO.1 "Meeting the Yocto Project"
A synopsis of the books content
Information on where to buy this book

About the Authors
Otavio Salvador loves to play video games and started his free software activities
in 1999. In 2002, he founded O.S. Systems, a company focused on embedded system
development services and consultancy worldwide, creating and maintaining customized
BSPs and helping companies with their release management challenges. This resulted
in him joining the OpenEmbedded community in 2008, when he became an active
contributor to the OpenEmbedded project, culminating in his attribution as the
maintainer of the Freescale ARM BSP layer in the Yocto Project in 2011.

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Daiane Angolini has been focusing on embedded technologies for the past 8 years.
Since 2008, she has been working on Freescale Semiconductors as an application
engineer, on internal development and porting custom applications from Android
to Freescale architectures, and on customer support for ARM processors of the i.MX
family, while also participating in Freescale forums. She has been working with the
Yocto Project tools through meta-fsl-arm, the BSP meta layer that provides board
support for Freescale ARM machines, since 2012. The desire to become an expert
in ice cream making has been keeping her busy in her spare time for the past year.
We initially want to thank our families. They provided lovely support
and helped us to get on track for this project.
This project has only been possible because we had support from many
people who provided insights, reviews, material, and guidance during the
full period of conception and production of this book. We'd like to give
special thanks to (in alphabetic order): Alex Gonzlez, Alexandru Vaduva,
Harsha Bharwani, J effrey Osier-Mixon, J ohn Weber, Manan Badani, Paul
Eggleton, Rogerio Nunes, Radek Dostl, Sageer Parkar, and Sankalp Pawar
- Otavio Salvador and Daiane Angolini

Embedded Linux Development with
Yocto Project
Considering the current technology trend, Linux is the next big thing. Linux
has consistently released cutting-edge open source products, and embedded
systems have been added to the technological portfolio of mankind.
The Yocto Project is in an optimal position to be the choice for your projects;
it provides a rich set of tools to help you to use most of your energy and resources
in your product development, instead of reinventing the wheel.
The usual tasks and requirements for embedded Linux-based products and
development teams were the guidelines for this book's conception. Written by
active community members with a practical and straightforward approach, it
is a stepping stone for both your learning curve and your product's project.
What This Book Covers
Chapter 1, Meeting the Yocto Project, presents the history of the Yocto Project,
showing the parts that compose it.
Chapter 2, Baking Our Poky-based System, introduces the environment needed
for the first build.
Chapter 3, Using Hob to Bake an Image, shows the user-friendly graphical
interface that can be used as a wrapper for configuration and as a build tool.
Chapter 4, Grasping the BitBake Tool, presents the first concepts and premises
of the tool used to control all other pieces of the Yocto Project.
Chapter 5, Detailing the Temporary Build Directory, details the output directory
tree of a build with focus on the tmp directory.
Chapter 6, Assimilating Packaging Support, introduces the package concepts
and details the packaging support used by the Yocto Project.
Chapter 7, Diving into BitBake Metadata, details the concepts and syntaxes
used by the Yocto Project metadata, both in recipes and configuration files.
Chapter 8, Developing with the Yocto Project, details how to use the Yocto
Project to generate a custom development environment.
Chapter 9, Debugging with the Yocto Project, details which debug tools the
Yocto Project provides and how to use them.

Chapter 10, Exploring External Layers, explores one of the most important
concepts of the Yocto Project, which is the flexibility of using external layers.
Chapter 11, Creating Custom Layers, practices the steps of creation of layers.
Chapter 12, Customizing Existing Recipes, lists the common use cases of recipe
customization and how to achieve them properly.
Chapter 13, Achieving GPL Compliance, summarizes the tasks and concepts
involved in a copyleft compliance product.
Chapter 14, Booting Our Custom Embedded Linux, uses a real hardware machine
together with the Yocto Project's tools.
Appendix, References, lists the references used in the book.

Meeting the Yocto Project
In this chapter, we will be introduced to the Yocto Project. The main concepts of the
project, which are constantly used throughout the book, are discussed here. We will
discuss the Yocto Project history, OpenEmbedded, Poky, BitBake, and Metadata in
brief, so fasten your seat belt and welcome aboard!
What is the Yocto Project?
The Yocto Project is a Linux Foundation workgroup dened as:
"The Yocto Project provides open source, high-quality infrastructure and tools
to help developers create their own custom Linux distributions for any hardware
architecture, across multiple market segments. The Yocto Project is intended to
provide a helpful starting point for developers."
The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates,
tools, and methods to help us create custom Linux-based systems for embedded
products regardless of the hardware architecture. Being managed by a Linux
Foundation fellow, the project remains independent of its member organizations that
participate in various ways and provide resources to the project.
It was founded in 2010 as a collaboration of many hardware manufacturers, open
source operating systems, vendors, and electronics companies in an effort to reduce
their work duplication, providing resources and information catering to both new
and experienced users.
Among these resources is OpenEmbedded-Core, the core system component,
provided by the OpenEmbedded project.

[ 8 ]
The Yocto Project is, therefore, a community open source project that aggregates
several companies, communities, projects, and tools, gathering people with the same
purpose to build a Linux-based embedded product; all these components are in the
same boat, being driven by its community needs to work together.
Delineating the Yocto Project
To ease our understanding of the duties and outcomes provided by the Yocto Project,
we can use the analogy of a computing machine. The input is a set of data that
describes what we want, that is, our specication. As an output, we have the desired
Linux-based embedded product.
If the output is a product running a Linux-based operating system, the result
generated is the pieces that compose the operating system, such as the Linux kernel,
bootloader, and the root lesystem (rootfs) bundle, which are properly organized.
To produce the resultant rootfs bundle and other deliverables, the Yocto Project's
tools are present in all intermediary steps. The reuse of previously built utilities
and other software components are maximized while building other applications,
libraries, and any other software components in the right order and with the
desired conguration, including the fetching of the required source code from
their respective repositories such as The Linux Kernel Archives (www.kernel.org),
GitHub, and www.SourceForge.net.
Preparing its own build environment, utilities, and toolchain, the amount of host
software dependency is reduced, but a more important implication is that the
determinism is considerably increased. The utilities, versions, and conguration
options are the same, minimizing the number of host utilities to rely on.
We can list some projects, such as Poky, BitBake, and OpenEmbedded-Core, under
the Yocto Project umbrella, all of them being complimentary and playing specic
roles in the system. We will understand exactly how they work together in this
chapter and throughout the book.
Understanding Poky
Poky is the Yocto Project reference system and is composed of a collection of tools
and metadata. It is platform-independent and performs cross-compiling, using the
BitBake tool, OpenEmbedded Core, and a default set of metadata, as shown in the
following gure. It provides the mechanism to build and combine thousands of
distributed open source projects to form a fully customizable, complete, and coherent
Linux software stack.

Chapter 1
[ 9 ]
Poky's main objective is to provide all the features an embedded developer needs.
Yocto-specific Metadata (meta-yocto)
Yocto-specific BSP (meta-yocto-bsp)
OpenEmbedded-Core (meta)
BitBake Tool (bitbake)
Poky Build Tool
Using BitBake
BitBake is a task scheduler that parses Python and Shell Script mixed code. The code
parsed generates and runs tasks, which are basically a set of steps ordered according
to the code's dependencies.
It evaluates all available conguration les and recipe data (known as metadata),
managing dynamic variable expansion, dependencies, and code generation. It keeps
track of all tasks being processed in order to ensure completion, maximizing the use
of processing resources to reduce build time and being predictable. The development
of BitBake is centralized in the bitbake-devel@lists.openembedded.org mailing
list, and its code can be found in the bitbake subdirectory of Poky.
OpenEmbedded-Core
The OpenEmbedded-Core metadata collection provides the engine of the Poky build
tool. It is designed to provide the core features and needs to be as clean as possible.
It provides support for ve different processor architectures (ARM, x86, x86-64,
PowerPC, MIPS and MIPS64), supporting only QEMU-emulated machines.
The development is centralized in the openembedded-core@lists.openembedded.
org mailing list, and houses its metadata inside the meta subdirectory of Poky.

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Metadata
The metadata, which is composed of a mix of Python and Shell Script text les,
provides a tremendously exible system. Poky uses this to extend OpenEmbedded-
Core and includes two different layers, which are another metadata subset shown
as follows:
meta-yocto: This layer provides the default and supported distributions,
visual branding, and metadata tracking information (maintainers, upstream
status, and so on)
meta-yocto-bsp: This layer, on top of it, provides the hardware reference
boards support for use in Poky
Chapter 7, Diving into BitBake Metadata, explores the metadata in more detail and
serves as a reference when we write o ur own recipes.
The alliance of OpenEmbedded Project
and Yocto Project
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 tasks scheduler
inspired and based on the Gentoo Portage package system named BitBake. The project
has grown its software collection, and a number of supported machines at a fast pace.
As consequence of uncoordinated development, it is difcult 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. This 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,
emphasizing an increased use of additional components, metadata, and subsets.

Chapter 1
[ 11 ]
Summary
This rst chapter provided an overview on how the OpenEmbedded Project is
related to the Yocto Project, the components which form Poky, and how it was
created. In the next chapter, we will be introduced to the Poky workow with steps
to download, congure, and prepare the Poky build environment, and how to have
the very rst image built and running using QEMU.

Where to buy this book
You can buy Embedded Linux Development with Yocto Project from the Packt
Publishing website: ht t p: / / www. packt pub. com/ embedded- l i nux-
devel opment - wi t h- yoct o- pr oj ect / book.
Free shipping to the US, UK, Europe and selected Asian countries. For more information, please
read our shipping policy.
Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and
most internet book retailers.

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