Yocto Configuration

When you need to work with the Yocto project, you typically create recipes for your own software or your company’s software, combine various layers including these recipes, and create a unified Linux image for use. In this case, the Yocto Project serves the role of combining various layers to create a single image.

And when you think about it, our software sometimes needs to run in various environments (architectures), and there are cases where you need to build with different configurations based on the same source code.

Since Yocto is widely used in the automotive industry, let’s use automotive industry Yocto configuration as an example.

Let’s assume our software module that needs to be built is called TestModule, and TestModule doesn’t just need to support one car model but various vehicle models.

Then when building TestModule, we need to support various configurations from the source code level to support different vehicle models. It would be nice if TestModule were a script-based application like Python or Bash, but most likely it’s written in languages like C/C++ or Rust, Go. This means not only source code but also build systems like Makefile, CMake, Scons, Meson, Bazel for building would be used variously.

If we call the build system’s configure tool a Configure Tool, this Configure Tool also needs to support various options.

In other words, we need to support various configurations at the source code level, Configure tool level, and even at the Yocto level.

Configuration design is really important, and if this design is managed through a high-level build framework like Yocto, it’s much more convenient and flexible than managing configuration through the build system’s Configure Tool.

In this post, I want to explore how Yocto manages configuration.

Yocto Configuration

There are several ways to manage configuration in Yocto, but in this post, I want to explore how to manage configuration using Yocto’s Bitbake.

1. How to manage configuration using Yocto’s Bitbake
2. How to pass configuration to Bitbake when building with Yocto’s Bitbake without using Yocto’s Bitbake

I’ll continue writing in the next post…

Reference

• Yocto Project Reference Manual
• My brain