Build steps (Kirkstone)

Owned by Albinleo Velappan (Deactivated)
Last updated: 29. Sep 2023 by Dietmar Muscholik
4 min read

System requirements:

  • Operating System: Yocto supports various Linux distributions as build environments, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and CentOS. The latest version of your chosen distribution should be installed on your build machine.

  • Required Packages: To build a Yocto image, you will need to install a number of development packages, including Git, curl, tar, and unzip. The exact packages required will depend on your build machine's operating system.

  • Disk Space: Building a Yocto image requires a significant amount of disk space. You should have at least 100 GB of free disk space per target available on your build machine to ensure that the build process can complete successfully.

  • Processor and Memory: A minimum of 16GB of RAM is available. Our recommendation is 32GB.

    • 64GB RAM accelerates the build because you can keep most of the files in a RAM cache

    • A CPU with a minimum of eight cores

  • Network Connection: You will need a fast and reliable internet connection to download the necessary software and packages during the build process.

  • Linux User: Log into the build machine as a non-root user.

    • If you are a root user:

      • Add another user.

      • Log in as the non-root user before proceeding further.

  • Build time: The build time may take from 1 to 3 hours or even more according to machine configuration and speed.

Getting started for Yocto Kirkstone build.

Preparing the host system

There are some requirements to the host system.

Ubuntu 20.04.5

Tested distribution is currently Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS. An installation-Image can be found here:

https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04/ubuntu-20.04.5-desktop-amd64.iso

This should work as virtual machine (Virtual box ...) or bare-metal installation.

Yocto related base software

Needed tools are listed in the yocto documentation.

Execute the following commands to install them:

sudo apt install curl python tree gawk wget git diffstat unzip texinfo gcc g++ build-essential chrpath socat cpio python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping python3-git python3-jinja2 libegl1-mesa libsdl1.2-dev pylint3 xterm python3-subunit mesa-common-dev zstd liblz4-tool

Docker build images

The release builds are executed on docker images based on crops/poky:ubuntu-20.04. The seconorth container images can be found in the SECO gitlab container registry

Development tools

Additional development tools that may be useful:

sudo apt install git minicom gdb-multiarch crossbuild-essential-armhf meld gedit nano cscope quilt qtcreator

Install the repo tool

If available the tool can also be installed from the distributions package manager. This directly downloads the latest version from google. See git-repo - Git at Google .

mkdir ~/bin # once curl http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo # once chmod a+x ~/bin/repo # once echo "export PATH=${PATH}:~/bin" >> ~/.bashrc # once source ~/.bashrc

Local Git setup:

Download and build the SECO Northern Europe Yocto

This section describes steps to create a local build dir and how to use repo to download all needed files. After that the build directory gets setup for one specific machine (seco-mx6, seco-mx6ull, seco-mx8mm or seco-mx8mp) and distribution (seconorth-wayland) and a standard image is built.

Download source code

The repo tool stores its meta data in a hidden subdirectory called .repo. The manifest file is stored at .repo/manifests/default.xml and is used for the sync command which actually downloads the sources.

The selected branch is kirkstone.

After the download the resulting directory structure should look like this:

Build

To get the build environment ready run the environment needs to be set up.

Accept the EULA agreement and proceed further.

For SECO i.MX8M platforms TANARO and Trizeps VIII Mini:

For SECO i.MX8MP platform Trizeps VIII Plus:

For the i.MX6Q/DL platforms SANTARO, SANTINO, SANTINO-LT, SANTOKA and other SAN* platforms if supported:

Then build the default SECO Northern Europe image

Installation

Installation using preinstalled Flash-N-GO System

After the image was built the files are located under build/tmp/deploy/images/seco-[mx8mp|mx8mm|...]/. The files needed are installation file fng_install.sh and the root file system seconorth-image-seco-[mx6|mx8mm|mx8mp|...].tar.gz. These files can be used in a Flash-N-Go System installation process.

See the Flash-N-Go System manual for more information.

GitLab access

It should not be necessary to have a SECO GitLab account to build the standard images. The public access should be sufficient to do that.

However, for customer specific layers and configurations, that are not publicly accessible, a SECO GiLab account is necessary. Contact a SECO Software expert or the Technical Support to get access.

You need too generate a key-pair and register this with your SECO GitLab account, see the gitlab docs.

Copy and add the key content to your GitLab Profile User Settings -> SSH keys)