Setup

References

This guide is based on the NXP/Freescale Yocto Project User’s Guide. See it here.

The instructions for setting up and building Linux in the Yocto Project were adopted to our products.

A list of helpful bitbake commands can be found here:

NXP/Freescale - Useful bitbake commands

A cheat sheet for bitbake:

Bitbake Cheat Sheet

Requirements

For Yocto a Linux Host Machine is needed.

Hint

The supported distributions are listed at the official Yocto documentation.

If you’re running such a machine, you should be fine, else we recommend to use VirtualBox to run a virtual machine. Use an Ubuntu 16.04 instance. Get a working-ready virtual machine image from osboxes.org.

See their guide to run the virtual machine image.

An important consideration is the hard disk space required for the virtual appliance. It is recommended that at least 120 GiB is provided, 500 GiB would be better.

Host Packages

The Yocto framework requires (build) dependencies that need to be available on the host system for the builds.

To meet minimal version requirements you should have the following installed:

• Git 1.8.3.1 or greater

• tar 1.27 or greater

• Python 3.4.0 or greater

If your system does not meet these requirements see this.

To get the right packages for your build host, have a look at the official Yocto project documentation.

Essential Yocto Project host packages are:

sudo apt-get install gawk wget git-core diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib \
build-essential chrpath socat libsdl1.2-dev

Setting up Git

If not already done, setup git with the commands below:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "Your Email"
git config --list

Setting up the Repo Utility [1]

Repo is a tool built on top of Git that makes it easier to manage projects that contain multiple repositories, which do not need to be on the same server. Repo complements very well the layered nature of the Yocto Project, making it easier for users to add their own layers to the BSP.

To install the “repo” utility, perform these steps:

1. Create a bin folder in the home directory:

mkdir ~/bin (this step may not be needed if the bin folder already exists)
curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

2. Add the following line to the ~/.bashrc file to ensure that the ~/bin folder is in your PATH variable:

export PATH=~/bin:$PATH

BSP Checkout

The Repo tool checks out different layers for you, which are defined in our XML-manifest. Their source code can be found in sources directory, which contains the recipes and machine configurations used to build the image.

Branch	Kernel Version	Supported Machines
4.14.98-2.3.0-sumo	4.14.98-2.3.0	TX8M-(1610|1620|ND00), QS8M-MQ00, TX6 series, TXUL series
4.14.98-2.2.0-sumo	4.14.98-2.2.0	TX8M series, TX6 series, TXUL series , (Added: TX8M-ND00)
4.14.98-2.0.0_ga-sumo	4.14.98-2.0.0	TX8M series (TX8M-1610 only), TX6 series, TXUL series

The directory karo-nxp-bsp is just an example and can be chosen free.

mkdir karo-nxp-bsp
cd karo-nxp-bsp
repo init -u https://github.com/karo-electronics/karo-nxp-bsp -b <branchname>
repo sync

You can update the codebase if you want to, which can be performed via the following command:

repo sync

If errors occur during repo initialization, try deleting the .repo directory and running the repo initialization command again.

Building Images

Continue depending on the Module you want to build images for:

• Building TX8M/QS8M Series
  • U-Boot Version
  • Building The Image
  • Restarting a build environment
  • Image Deployment
• Building TX6/TXUL Series
  • U-Boot Hint
  • Building the image
  • Restarting a build environment
  • Image Deployment

[1]

Copied from the official NXP Yocto Project User’s Guide, mentioned above.