4.4 Moving to the Yocto Project 1.5 Release

This section provides migration information for moving to the Yocto Project 1.5 Release from the prior release.

4.4.1 Host Dependency Changes

The OpenEmbedded build system now has some additional requirements on the host system:

  • Python 2.7.3+

  • Tar 1.24+

  • Git 1.7.8+

  • Patched version of Make if you are using 3.82. Most distributions that provide Make 3.82 use the patched version.

If the Linux distribution you are using on your build host does not provide packages for these, you can install and use the Buildtools tarball, which provides an SDK-like environment containing them.

For more information on this requirement, see the “Required Git, tar, Python and gcc Versions” section.

4.4.2 atom-pc Board Support Package (BSP)

The atom-pc hardware reference BSP has been replaced by a genericx86 BSP. This BSP is not necessarily guaranteed to work on all x86 hardware, but it will run on a wider range of systems than the atom-pc did.

Note

Additionally, a genericx86-64 BSP has been added for 64-bit Atom systems.

4.4.3 BitBake

The following changes have been made that relate to BitBake:

  • BitBake now supports a _remove operator. The addition of this operator means you will have to rename any items in recipe space (functions, variables) whose names currently contain _remove_ or end with _remove to avoid unexpected behavior.

  • BitBake’s global method pool has been removed. This method is not particularly useful and led to clashes between recipes containing functions that had the same name.

  • The “none” server backend has been removed. The “process” server backend has been serving well as the default for a long time now.

  • The bitbake-runtask script has been removed.

  • ${P} and ${PF} are no longer added to PROVIDES by default in bitbake.conf. These version-specific PROVIDES items were seldom used. Attempting to use them could result in two versions being built simultaneously rather than just one version due to the way BitBake resolves dependencies.

4.4.4 QA Warnings

The following changes have been made to the package QA checks:

  • If you have customized ERROR_QA or WARN_QA values in your configuration, check that they contain all of the issues that you wish to be reported. Previous Yocto Project versions contained a bug that meant that any item not mentioned in ERROR_QA or WARN_QA would be treated as a warning. Consequently, several important items were not already in the default value of WARN_QA. All of the possible QA checks are now documented in the “insane.bbclass” section.

  • An additional QA check has been added to check if /usr/share/info/dir is being installed. Your recipe should delete this file within do_install if “make install” is installing it.

  • If you are using the buildhistory class, the check for the package version going backwards is now controlled using a standard QA check. Thus, if you have customized your ERROR_QA or WARN_QA values and still wish to have this check performed, you should add “version-going-backwards” to your value for one or the other variables depending on how you wish it to be handled. See the documented QA checks in the “insane.bbclass” section.

4.4.5 Directory Layout Changes

The following directory changes exist:

  • Output SDK installer files are now named to include the image name and tuning architecture through the SDK_NAME variable.

  • Images and related files are now installed into a directory that is specific to the machine, instead of a parent directory containing output files for multiple machines. The DEPLOY_DIR_IMAGE variable continues to point to the directory containing images for the current MACHINE and should be used anywhere there is a need to refer to this directory. The runqemu script now uses this variable to find images and kernel binaries and will use BitBake to determine the directory. Alternatively, you can set the DEPLOY_DIR_IMAGE variable in the external environment.

  • When buildhistory is enabled, its output is now written under the Build Directory rather than TMPDIR. Doing so makes it easier to delete TMPDIR and preserve the build history. Additionally, data for produced SDKs is now split by IMAGE_NAME.

  • The pkgdata directory produced as part of the packaging process has been collapsed into a single machine-specific directory. This directory is located under sysroots and uses a machine-specific name (i.e. tmp/sysroots/machine/pkgdata).

4.4.6 Shortened Git SRCREV Values

BitBake will now shorten revisions from Git repositories from the normal 40 characters down to 10 characters within SRCPV for improved usability in path and file names. This change should be safe within contexts where these revisions are used because the chances of spatially close collisions is very low. Distant collisions are not a major issue in the way the values are used.

4.4.7 IMAGE_FEATURES

The following changes have been made that relate to IMAGE_FEATURES:

  • The value of IMAGE_FEATURES is now validated to ensure invalid feature items are not added. Some users mistakenly add package names to this variable instead of using IMAGE_INSTALL in order to have the package added to the image, which does not work. This change is intended to catch those kinds of situations. Valid IMAGE_FEATURES are drawn from PACKAGE_GROUP definitions, COMPLEMENTARY_GLOB and a new “validitems” varflag on IMAGE_FEATURES. The “validitems” varflag change allows additional features to be added if they are not provided using the previous two mechanisms.

  • The previously deprecated “apps-console-core” IMAGE_FEATURES item is no longer supported. Add “splash” to IMAGE_FEATURES if you wish to have the splash screen enabled, since this is all that apps-console-core was doing.

4.4.8 /run

The /run directory from the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard 3.0 has been introduced. You can find some of the implications for this change here. The change also means that recipes that install files to /var/run must be changed. You can find a guide on how to make these changes here.

4.4.9 Removal of Package Manager Database Within Image Recipes

The image core-image-minimal no longer adds remove_packaging_data_files to ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND. This addition is now handled automatically when “package-management” is not in IMAGE_FEATURES. If you have custom image recipes that make this addition, you should remove the lines, as they are not needed and might interfere with correct operation of postinstall scripts.

4.4.10 Images Now Rebuild Only on Changes Instead of Every Time

The do_rootfs and other related image construction tasks are no longer marked as “nostamp”. Consequently, they will only be re-executed when their inputs have changed. Previous versions of the OpenEmbedded build system always rebuilt the image when requested rather when necessary.

4.4.11 Task Recipes

The previously deprecated task.bbclass has now been dropped. For recipes that previously inherited from this class, you should rename them from task-* to packagegroup-* and inherit packagegroup instead.

For more information, see the “packagegroup.bbclass” section.

4.4.12 BusyBox

By default, we now split BusyBox into two binaries: one that is suid root for those components that need it, and another for the rest of the components. Splitting BusyBox allows for optimization that eliminates the tinylogin recipe as recommended by upstream. You can disable this split by setting BUSYBOX_SPLIT_SUID to “0”.

4.4.13 Automated Image Testing

A new automated image testing framework has been added through the testimage.bbclass class. This framework replaces the older imagetest-qemu framework.

You can learn more about performing automated image tests in the “Performing Automated Runtime Testing” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.

4.4.14 Build History

Following are changes to Build History:

  • Installed package sizes: installed-package-sizes.txt for an image now records the size of the files installed by each package instead of the size of each compressed package archive file.

  • The dependency graphs (depends*.dot) now use the actual package names instead of replacing dashes, dots and plus signs with underscores.

  • The buildhistory-diff and buildhistory-collect-srcrevs utilities have improved command-line handling. Use the --help option for each utility for more information on the new syntax.

For more information on Build History, see the “Maintaining Build Output Quality” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.

4.4.15 udev

Following are changes to udev:

  • udev no longer brings in udev-extraconf automatically through RRECOMMENDS, since this was originally intended to be optional. If you need the extra rules, then add udev-extraconf to your image.

  • udev no longer brings in pciutils-ids or usbutils-ids through RRECOMMENDS. These are not needed by udev itself and removing them saves around 350KB.

4.4.16 Removed and Renamed Recipes

  • The linux-yocto 3.2 kernel has been removed.

  • libtool-nativesdk has been renamed to nativesdk-libtool.

  • tinylogin has been removed. It has been replaced by a suid portion of Busybox. See the “BusyBox” section for more information.

  • external-python-tarball has been renamed to buildtools-tarball.

  • web-webkit has been removed. It has been functionally replaced by midori.

  • imake has been removed. It is no longer needed by any other recipe.

  • transfig-native has been removed. It is no longer needed by any other recipe.

  • anjuta-remote-run has been removed. Anjuta IDE integration has not been officially supported for several releases.

4.4.17 Other Changes

Following is a list of short entries describing other changes:

  • run-postinsts: Make this generic.

  • base-files: Remove the unnecessary media/xxx directories.

  • alsa-state: Provide an empty asound.conf by default.

  • classes/image: Ensure BAD_RECOMMENDATIONS supports pre-renamed package names.

  • classes/rootfs_rpm: Implement BAD_RECOMMENDATIONS for RPM.

  • systemd: Remove systemd_unitdir if systemd is not in DISTRO_FEATURES.

  • systemd: Remove init.d dir if systemd unit file is present and sysvinit is not a distro feature.

  • libpam: Deny all services for the OTHER entries.

  • image.bbclass: Move runtime_mapping_rename to avoid conflict with multilib. See YOCTO #4993 in Bugzilla for more information.

  • linux-dtb: Use kernel build system to generate the dtb files.

  • kern-tools: Switch from guilt to new kgit-s2q tool.