Is it possible to create only a U-Boot in Yocto?

[Tom2023]

Is there a way to just build U-Boot and a boot container (flash.bin) in Yocto rather than building a full Linux distribution which takes quite a long time? What is the fastest way to create a flash.bin?

[BillStrahm]

Yes there is,

The joy of yocto is you can build anything that the final image depends on by itself.  (and of course the dependency of that thing)

I believe what you need is actually:

bitbake u-boot-imx

There may be an additional bitbake you need to get the flash image depending on where it boots from 

that may only build the uboot and you will need to find the build for the correct flash.bin image (well called something.bin) in the yocto guilde here

i.MX Yocto Project User's Guide (nxp.com)

[Tom2023]

It works. This command does the trick:

bitbake imx-boot

It produces not only U-Boot, but also the complete boot container. And instead of 14GB, I only need 2GB of tar files in the downloads directory in order to generate flash.bin. That's wonderful. Thanks again!

[Tom2023]

Thank you so much. I will try it.