Re: Megapatches (Was: Lua Foundation?)

[Ross Berteig <ross@...>]

On 4/25/2017 11:28 PM, Paige DePol wrote:
> As you forgot your footnote I am going to guess you mean this URL:
> https://www.yoctoproject.org

Oops. Yes, that is the site.

Part of the rich complexity is that they break the build into many 
fine-grain phases such as fetching all the files, unpacking tarballs and 
zipballs, applying patches, configure, make, test, and a number of 
installation phases. Their system keeps all of the intermediate steps, 
which makes it possible to figure out what happened when something goes 
wrong, but also means it needs a fair bit of disk space to do a build.

My challenge was to figure out how to set up a build containing a fair 
approximation of the tools we'd need, and then add to the structure 
"correctly" a tool that was written in my shop for my customer's 
project. That was not made easier by the wall of opaque documentation 
that sort of assumes you already know what all the players are and do. 
But it was helped along substantially by our chosen board vendor 
(Gumstix, purveyors of fine and extremely tiny Linux computers on 
modules) providing a complete set of recipes for a working Yocto system 
that I could use as a starting point.

It is pretty clear from both the general Yocto community and the Gumstix 
user to user support channels that people are happily using Yocto's 
build system to create deeply embedded distros for routers and various 
internet facing appliances.

As long as you are willing to devote lots of disk space and plenty of 
run time for a complete build, it is a nifty piece of work. I'm not sure 
I'd recommend my approach, which was to run my builds in a virtual 
machine booting Ubuntu on my Windows PC. While it worked, it would 
likely have been less fuss and bother in the end to have dedicated a PC 
to the task. Aside from performance of the VM and a chronically too 
small disk due to needing to take disk away from my Windows box for the 
purpose, the other source of friction was managing to create a properly 
formatted and configured bootable SD card from the finished Yocto image. 
My expedient answer was to just scp the files to a real Linux box where 
I could plug in a card reader and run the shell script that partitioned 
and formatted the card. Today, I suspect there are other answers that 
likely would have worked from the Windows side.

--
Ross Berteig                               Ross@CheshireEng.com
Cheshire Engineering Corp.           http://www.CheshireEng.com/
+1 626 303 1602