DESK-MX6UL-L/Development/Building the Yocto BSP
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| 2023/05/05 | DESK-MX6UL-L 4.0.0 release | ||
Contents
Building the Yocto BSP[edit | edit source]
Quick reference[edit | edit source]
| Repository | BSP Manifest | Yocto BSP Layer |
|---|---|---|
| URL | git@git.dave.eu:desk-mx-l/desk-mx-l-bsp.git | git@git.dave.eu:desk-mx-l/meta-desk-mx.git |
| stable branch | kirkstone | kirkstone |
| stable tag | desk-mx6ul-l-4.0.0 | desk-mx6ul-l-4.0.0 |
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| dave-image-devel | This image include tools for development/debugging |
| desk-image-qt6 | This image include a Qt6 graphic backend on framebuffer |
Introduction[edit | edit source]
As known, in addition to a bootloader and the o.s. kernel, an embedded Linux system needs a root file system to operate. The root file system must contain everything needed to support the Linux system (applications, settings, data, etc.). The root file system is the file system that is contained on the same partition on which the root directory is located. The Linux kernel, at the end of its startup stage, mounts the root file system on the configured root device and finally launches the /sbin/init, the first user space process and "father" of all the other processes.
For more information on the Linux filesystem, please refer to http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2010/09/linux-file-system-structure/.
DESK-MX6UL-L provides one (or more) pre-built root file system, that can be used during the evaluation/development/deployment cycle. For instance, the root file system included in the dave-image-devel image is suited for the development phase, since it provides a relatively rich set of packages including tools and libraries used to debug the application code. The pre-built root file systems are located here: /home/dvdk/<target_name>/rfs/<kit_name>.
Besides the pre-built root file systems, DAVE also provides a rich repository containing pre-built applications and libraries. These packages can be easily installed on the target by using the dnf tool. Please refer to this section for more details.
To generate the supported root file systems, the build of the Yocto BSP has to be run. The output of this process is an image containing the U-Boot binary file, the Linux kernel image, and the selected root file system image. The following sections describe in detail how to execute this operation.
For more general information regarding the Yocto build system, please refer the dedicated category page.
How to build the Yocto BSP images including the U-Boot binary file, the Linux kernel image, and the target root file system image[edit | edit source]
 The following procedure requires the access to the DAVE Embedded Systems' git repositories. The access to such repositories is granted to development kit's owners only. Please refer to this page for detailed instructions on how to get it. |
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This process requires a lot of hardware resources in terms of disk storage, RAM, and processing power. For this reason, it also is recommended to consider the use of a physical machine. For more details on this topic, please refer to the NXP documentation on this BSP, i.e. the i.MX Yocto Project User's Guide, which talks about the hosto setup for the Yocto build system. |
Initialize the build environment[edit | edit source]
Before running the build, the environment must be initialized properly.
DESK-MX6UL-L Yocto BSP uses git-repo tool to fetch all the required git repositories.
To install it, please use the following commands:
dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l$ curl http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo-1 > repo dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l$ chmod a+x repo dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l$ ./repo init -u git@git.dave.eu:desk-mx-l/desk-mx-l-bsp.git -b refs/tags/desk-mx6ul-l-4.0.0 dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l$ ./repo sync -c
Running the build[edit | edit source]
Please note that even the basic root file system requires a few hours to build on a mid/hi range desktop (4-6 cores, 8-12 GiB RAM) also depending on your Internet connection speed (all sources are fetched from the network). Nearly 80GiB of disk space is required for the build. The process may be slowed down significantly since the performances of a virtual machine are reduced if compared to the physical hardware. Thus, it's recommended to check the hardware capabilities of the host system and, when building with Yocto is required, to consider the following options:
- Migrating the build system to a physical machine
- Assuming that the host system has the required resources, extending the hardware capabilities of the default MVM (e.g. adding more cores and disk space).
Once completed the initialization phase, developers can launch the Yocto image build process with the following commands:
dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l$ DISTRO=fsl-imx-fb MACHINE=desk-mx6ul-axelulite source desk-setup-release.sh -b build-fb dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l/build-fb$ bitbake desk-image-qt6
Where <target-image-name> is one of the images listed in here.
Once the build process is completed, the resulting files (the U-Boot binaries, the Linux kernel image, the device tree blob, the .tar.gz compressed root file system image, etc.) will be available in build-fb/tmp/deploy/images/desk-mx6ul-axelulite using the environment prepared as stated above.
Generating the SDKs[edit | edit source]
After creating an image as described in the previous version, the corresponding SDK can be generated by issuing the following command:
bitbake <target-image-name> -c populate-sdk
Again, replace <target-image-name> with one of the images listed in here.
Building additional packages[edit | edit source]
To build additional packages the user must first enter the directory where the desk-setup-release.sh is placed and source it
dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l$ DISTRO=fsl-imx-fb MACHINE=desk-mx6ul-axelulite source desk-setup-release.sh -b build-fb
And then can run any of the bitbake command.
dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l/build-fb$ bitbake qtlanguageserver
The resulting packages (the default format is rpm) can be found inside build/tmp/deploy/rpm.
dvdk@vagrant:~/desk-mx-l/build-fb$ ls tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-* -1 tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-dbg-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-dev-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-plugins-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-ptest-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-qmlplugins-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm tmp/deploy/rpm/cortexa9t2hf_neon/qtlanguageserver-src-6.3.2-r0.cortexa9t2hf_neon.rpm
