Yocto for i.MX6

[scottmiller]

I've been reading numerous posts regarding Freescale's desire to cut over to yocto from ltib. Following the community directions, I have actually built yocto for the i.mx6 sabrelite board successfully. My client and I have a couple of questions regarding this:

• Does anybody out there have any idea when Freescale is going to make yocto official, thereby abandoning ltib?
• What is the easiest way to create a new distribution from a reference point using yocto? I have found the poky reference manual, but I was wondering specifically if there was a quicker way to understand how to create a custom set of recipes for a new platform based on, say, i.mx6 sabrelite.

Thanks,

Scott Miller

[OtavioSalvador · Accepted solution]

I think DaianeAngolini replied with a good overview of the possibilities.

Currently for our customers at O.S. Systems we always make a customer specific layer with their application and specific board support, without messing up with other layers, making easier to upgrade it for future Yocto releases and new BSP drops.

I advice you to avoid as much as possible to fork other layers as it will cause more problems than solve. Work with customer layers as it is the way to make it easy to maintain.

Regards,

[daiane_angolini]

I don't know the answer for your first question.

For your question #2

What do you mean by "new distribution"?

From yoctoproject you are able to use layers. You will need only poky layer (that will give you some tools like bitbake, and some basic apps, like ssh/busybox) and your BSP layer, for the imx case, it's meta-fsl-arm.

meta-fsl-arm will give you the board support packages, the packages that will bring your board to life (at the end, imx6 is a cortex A9 chip, but it does not tell you what u-boot to use for imx6 sabre lite, does it?), and accelerate it, for example, the VPU and GPU packages that are only for imx6.

besides that you have your custom application. It's not for board support, it's your own app. So, it should not be placed inside meta-fsl-arm.

We've been using meta-fsl-demos for placing the custom applications (like glcubes-demo https://github.com/Freescale/meta-fsl-demos/tree/master/recipes-graphics/glcubes-demo) and custom "demo" images (like fsl-image-test https://github.com/Freescale/meta-fsl-demos/blob/master/recipes-fsl/images/fsl-image-test.bb)

Yocto is able to deal with layers, so you can add a lot of other layers on your project (like meta-browser). And you are able to create any additional layer for you, and IMHO, it's a personal decision.

For imx6 sabre lite you have the BSP inside meta-fsl-arm-extras, so you don't need to deal with BSP on any other layer.

But, if you have your custom board, you can choose if you want to upstream your board or keep it only on your PC.

I'm not sure if I understood completely your question. Please, let me know if I missed any point.