Skip to content

Yocto Build System

Overview⚓︎

The operating system running on Host Mobility hardware and most of the tools are built from source. The build system used for this is the Yocto Build System. It combines software written by Host Mobility with free software from developers all over the world.

Building with Yocto⚓︎

  • To build packages and images, a Linux system is needed. The quickest way is to use our Docker build script:

Clone mobility-poky-platform 

git clone git@github.com:hostmobility/mobility-poky-platform.git && cd mobility-poky-platform

Build image for specific machine 

DL_DIR=$HOME/YOCTO_DOWNLOADS # Store downloads for reuse
scripts/bygg \
  --repo-sync \
  --delete-conf \
  --manifest-file kirkstone.xml \
  --machine imx8mp-var-dart-hmx1 \
  --image console-hostmobility-image \

See Building with Docker for details.

To get more information about what you can do with it, run scripts/bygg --help.

Native build environment⚓︎

Packages and images⚓︎

The Yocto system takes care of building software and its dependecies from recipe files in the meta- folders. The results are:

  • Packages (*.ipk) that can be installed on the hardware.
    From the packages,
  • System images (*.wic.gz or .img), created from packages, deployed to the hardware for full system upgrade.

Package server⚓︎

For our reference distributions we use the ipk package format and the opkg tool.

Typically, .ipk files are not installed manually but uploaded to a server.

We provide a package server at hostmobility.org.

Yocto details⚓︎

The software and configurations written by Host Mobility are hosted on Host Mobility's GitHub repositories. They fall into a number of categories:

Yocto metadata⚓︎

Recipes for use by bitbake that have a "meta-" prefix.

Versioned build system⚓︎

XML files with recipe repo versions.

Software source⚓︎

Source code for drivers and tools.