Yocto Project Overview

What is the Yocto Project?

The Yocto project may be defined as an open source project that enables developers to quickly build a linux based operating system for any CPU architecture. Thus, it’s popularity for single board computers (SBC).

It consistents of

  • OE-core

  • Bitbake

  • A number of OE Layers

Where can I find Documention

The core YP documentation can be found

https://docs.yoctoproject.org/

You’ll more than likely only use

What is poky?

Poky is a reference distrution that consists of working stable versions

  • OE-core

  • Bitbake

  • A custom reference BSP layer

  • A reference distribution file (conf/distro/poky.conf)

It’s fine to utilize during testing, but not for a production ready linux distribution.

OE (Open Embedded) Layers

To put it simply

Yocto can be broken up into a series of layers. Each layer contains BitBake recipes, classes, configs, includes, and sometimes python code which is used to build wic system image files. All files are used to generate the final linux distribution. This distro of course runs on your favorite single board computer (SBC).

Layers generally used in every OE project.

Image source can be found intel yocto project and embedded os curriculum.

../../_images/oe-layer-stack.png

What is Bitbake?

bitbake is the tool used to parse every layer defined in conf/bblayers.conf and executes the task/functions defined in recipes contained in each layer.

bitbake source code can be found here

https://git.openembedded.org/bitbake/