4.2 Moving to the Yocto Project 1.3 Release

This section provides migration information for moving to the Yocto Project 1.3 Release from the prior release.

4.2.1 Local Configuration

Differences include changes for SSTATE_MIRRORS and bblayers.conf.

4.2.1.1 SSTATE_MIRRORS

The shared state cache (sstate-cache), as pointed to by SSTATE_DIR, by default now has two-character subdirectories to prevent issues arising from too many files in the same directory. Also, native sstate-cache packages, which are built to run on the host system, will go into a subdirectory named using the distro ID string. If you copy the newly structured sstate-cache to a mirror location (either local or remote) and then point to it in SSTATE_MIRRORS, you need to append “PATH” to the end of the mirror URL so that the path used by BitBake before the mirror substitution is appended to the path used to access the mirror. Here is an example:

SSTATE_MIRRORS = "file://.* http://someserver.tld/share/sstate/PATH"

4.2.1.2 bblayers.conf

The meta-yocto layer consists of two parts that correspond to the Poky reference distribution and the reference hardware Board Support Packages (BSPs), respectively: meta-yocto and meta-yocto-bsp. When running BitBake for the first time after upgrading, your conf/bblayers.conf file will be updated to handle this change and you will be asked to re-run or restart for the changes to take effect.

4.2.2 Recipes

Differences include changes for the following:

4.2.2.1 Python Function Whitespace

All Python functions must now use four spaces for indentation. Previously, an inconsistent mix of spaces and tabs existed, which made extending these functions using _append or _prepend complicated given that Python treats whitespace as syntactically significant. If you are defining or extending any Python functions (e.g. populate_packages, do_unpack, do_patch and so forth) in custom recipes or classes, you need to ensure you are using consistent four-space indentation.

4.2.2.2 proto= in SRC_URI

Any use of proto= in SRC_URI needs to be changed to protocol=. In particular, this applies to the following URIs:

  • svn://

  • bzr://

  • hg://

  • osc://

Other URIs were already using protocol=. This change improves consistency.

4.2.2.3 nativesdk

The suffix nativesdk is now implemented as a prefix, which simplifies a lot of the packaging code for nativesdk recipes. All custom nativesdk recipes, which are relocatable packages that are native to SDK_ARCH, and any references need to be updated to use nativesdk-* instead of *-nativesdk.

4.2.2.4 Task Recipes

“Task” recipes are now known as “Package groups” and have been renamed from task-*.bb to packagegroup-*.bb. Existing references to the previous task-* names should work in most cases as there is an automatic upgrade path for most packages. However, you should update references in your own recipes and configurations as they could be removed in future releases. You should also rename any custom task-* recipes to packagegroup-*, and change them to inherit packagegroup instead of task, as well as taking the opportunity to remove anything now handled by packagegroup.bbclass, such as providing -dev and -dbg packages, setting LIC_FILES_CHKSUM, and so forth. See the “packagegroup.bbclass” section for further details.

4.2.2.5 IMAGE_FEATURES

Image recipes that previously included apps-console-core in IMAGE_FEATURES should now include splash instead to enable the boot-up splash screen. Retaining apps-console-core will still include the splash screen but generates a warning. The apps-x11-core and apps-x11-games IMAGE_FEATURES features have been removed.

4.2.2.6 Removed Recipes

The following recipes have been removed. For most of them, it is unlikely that you would have any references to them in your own Metadata. However, you should check your metadata against this list to be sure:

  • libx11-trim: Replaced by libx11, which has a negligible size difference with modern Xorg.

  • xserver-xorg-lite: Use xserver-xorg, which has a negligible size difference when DRI and GLX modules are not installed.

  • xserver-kdrive: Effectively unmaintained for many years.

  • mesa-xlib: No longer serves any purpose.

  • galago: Replaced by telepathy.

  • gail: Functionality was integrated into GTK+ 2.13.

  • eggdbus: No longer needed.

  • gcc-*-intermediate: The build has been restructured to avoid the need for this step.

  • libgsmd: Unmaintained for many years. Functionality now provided by ofono instead.

  • contacts, dates, tasks, eds-tools: Largely unmaintained PIM application suite. It has been moved to meta-gnome in meta-openembedded.

In addition to the previously listed changes, the meta-demoapps directory has also been removed because the recipes in it were not being maintained and many had become obsolete or broken. Additionally, these recipes were not parsed in the default configuration. Many of these recipes are already provided in an updated and maintained form within the OpenEmbedded community layers such as meta-oe and meta-gnome. For the remainder, you can now find them in the meta-extras repository, which is in the Source Repositories at https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-extras/.

4.2.3 Linux Kernel Naming

The naming scheme for kernel output binaries has been changed to now include PE as part of the filename:

KERNEL_IMAGE_BASE_NAME ?= "${KERNEL_IMAGETYPE}-${PE}-${PV}-${PR}-${MACHINE}-${DATETIME}"

Because the PE variable is not set by default, these binary files could result with names that include two dash characters. Here is an example:

bzImage--3.10.9+git0+cd502a8814_7144bcc4b8-r0-qemux86-64-20130830085431.bin