I am moving this thread over from the Wandboard forums https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/wandboard/kiuL_oIf6Qw
I am developing a product on the Wandboard-quad for a company that I have been interning with. Up till now I have been using Yocto to create an image for the SD card and to build a rootfs with which to cross-compile app-space code. I have struggled with it here and there, but it hasn't been too difficult to learn how to use it so far. Recently my company has asked me to move this development into Ltib. Currently Ltib is the only build tool they use, and they would prefer to keep it that way. I had started to look at what it would take to move the Wandboard BSP to Ltib, and quickly became overwhelmed by the complexity. This brings up three questions: 1.) Why Yocto instead of Ltib? What are the advantages? What made Freescale shift 100% over to Yocto? My company does not update to new boards very often; most of our products use rather old Power PCs. It may be more practical to bring Wandboard support into Ltib rather than having developers learn both tools. Essentially it boils down to "why would I want to use Yocto?". 2.) How can I make Yocto behave more like Ltib? We keep a copy of Ltib with all of the company specific patches on a local server. When a developer checks out a new copy of the project, all they have to do is run ltib once, the custom kernel and rootfs are already there. This process only takes a few minutes to complete, and the developer is up and running. How can this be done using Yocto? As a new Yocto user, one of the first steps is to run 'repo sync'. In my experience when doing this from scratch, this has taken over an hour to complete. Likewise, the first time I make an SD card image it takes a substantial amount of time. Yesterday I wanted to test something I had done against a demo image. I believe it took nearly three hours to complete the fsl-image-gui image (I have an i7 with 16gb of RAM). That is a long coffee break. If I need to modify something in my recipe, it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour to rebuild. How can I speed up this process? As a related question, how can I share a layer across multiple users? I am currently the only developer working on this project, however if the wandboard works out well for this particular project they may use it in others as well. With Ltib checked directly into the head of our project, our developers need to do very little. How can I set up Yocto so that the developer can pull from a repo and immediately have the custom layer, added to bblayers.conf and ready to bitbake? 3.) If I MUST use Ltib, how would I transfer the BSP? I have been told multiple times that this is not trivial, due to the number of patches that the gpu/vpu require. I have already spent an afternoon or two figuring out how Ltib works, and I am more or less comfortable with adding a new platform. That is, so long as the BSP is not overly complex. How can I find out EXACTLY which patches are used on the Wandboard, and where is the best place to get them? I have seen vpu patches all over the place in the meta-fsl-arm repo. Some are for the imx6 (sabre, boundary), other are for the wandboard exclusively. Some are for both. How can I determine what is relevant to me and what is not? Also, I hear that the kernel is being brought up to 3.10.9 and will include said gpu/vpu support. Presumably I would want to run through this entire process again with the new kernel, new kernel patches, etc. Video is absolutely vital to my project, and I would want to have the latest and greatest. I hope my questions are not too trivial that they can simply be looked up in the manual (although I'm sure some of them are). Maybe some of the answers can be added to the Freescale imx FAQ for others who may be in a similar situation as myself. Thank you for the help, Josh Kurland _______________________________________________ meta-freescale mailing list [email protected] https://lists.yoctoproject.org/listinfo/meta-freescale
