The MinnowBoard Chronicles Episode 22: Project Yocto success!

In the last episode of the MinnowBoard Chronicles, I shared my progress with building a qemux86 reference image using the Yocto Project. I’m pleased to say that the build is complete! Here’s how I did it.

In Episode 21, I at least got the image build started on Sunday afternoon, and as of Monday morning it had completed 1,230 out of 6,060 tasks. I’ve been simply following the Yocto Project Quick Start tutorial instructions, and kicked off the build with:

bitbake core-image-sato

I wanted to start building an image for the QEMU emulator first, and then move to creating an actual MinnowBoard Turbot image.

The two WARNINGs in yellow below were worrisome, but it seemed to keep going, so I just let it run through Monday afternoon and evening:

Yocto build working

Tuesday morning, I got up, and the first thing I did was to go look at the progress of the build. Disaster!

Yocto build boom

Out of the 6,060 tasks, it completed 4,049 of them, and then crashed!

The error messages weren’t particularly meaningful, and I did notice that we had had a home router outage sometime on Monday night (thanks Spectrum!), so I wondered if those were related. So, I just fired up bitbake again, and it proceeded where it left off: no work was lost!

When I got home from work on Tuesday, the build was finished! Yahoo! It only took about 48 hours:

Yocto build complete

The ultimate test, of course, is to see if the image works. For that, I wanted to run the image within the QEMU emulator, with this command:

runqemu qemux86

That worked too! I was delighted to see it launch the first time. Here are a couple of screenshots:

Yocto progress bar

QEMU

That’s all I had time for this week. In my next installment, I’ll build another image for the MinnowBoard, and have it running on real hardware. Stay tuned!

And now, a word from our sponsor: once I’ve got your image built, I’m going to want to debug the lowest levels of the boot process with SourcePoint. A good introduction to this technology is in our eBook, Intel Trace Hub | Finding Root Cause (note: requires registration).

Alan Sguigna