4.8 Moving to the Yocto Project 2.0 Release (jethro)

This section provides migration information for moving to the Yocto Project 2.0 Release (codename “jethro”) from the prior release.

4.8.1 GCC 5

The default compiler is now GCC 5.2. This change has required fixes for compilation errors in a number of other recipes.

One important example is a fix for when the Linux kernel freezes at boot time on ARM when built with GCC 5. If you are using your own kernel recipe or source tree and building for ARM, you will likely need to apply this patch. The standard linux-yocto kernel source tree already has a workaround for the same issue.

For further details, see https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-5/changes.html and the porting guide at https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-5/porting_to.html.

Alternatively, you can switch back to GCC 4.9 or 4.8 by setting GCCVERSION in your configuration, as follows:

GCCVERSION = "4.9%"

4.8.2 Gstreamer 0.10 Removed

Gstreamer 0.10 has been removed in favor of Gstreamer 1.x. As part of the change, recipes for Gstreamer 0.10 and related software are now located in meta-multimedia. This change results in Qt4 having Phonon and Gstreamer support in QtWebkit disabled by default.

4.8.3 Removed Recipes

The following recipes have been moved or removed:

  • bluez4: The recipe is obsolete and has been moved due to bluez5 becoming fully integrated. The bluez4 recipe now resides in meta-oe.

  • gamin: The recipe is obsolete and has been removed.

  • gnome-icon-theme: The recipe’s functionally has been replaced by adwaita-icon-theme.

  • Gstreamer 0.10 Recipes: Recipes for Gstreamer 0.10 have been removed in favor of the recipes for Gstreamer 1.x.

  • insserv: The recipe is obsolete and has been removed.

  • libunique: The recipe is no longer used and has been moved to meta-oe.

  • midori: The recipe’s functionally has been replaced by epiphany.

  • python-gst: The recipe is obsolete and has been removed since it only contains bindings for Gstreamer 0.10.

  • qt-mobility: The recipe is obsolete and has been removed since it requires Gstreamer 0.10, which has been replaced.

  • subversion: All 1.6.x versions of this recipe have been removed.

  • webkit-gtk: The older 1.8.3 version of this recipe has been removed in favor of webkitgtk.

4.8.4 BitBake datastore improvements

The method by which BitBake’s datastore handles overrides has changed. Overrides are now applied dynamically and bb.data.update_data() is now a no-op. Thus, bb.data.update_data() is no longer required in order to apply the correct overrides. In practice, this change is unlikely to require any changes to Metadata. However, these minor changes in behavior exist:

  • All potential overrides are now visible in the variable history as seen when you run the following:

    $ bitbake -e

  • d.delVar('VARNAME') and d.setVar('VARNAME', None) result in the variable and all of its overrides being cleared out. Before the change, only the non-overridden values were cleared.

4.8.5 Shell Message Function Changes

The shell versions of the BitBake message functions (i.e. bbdebug, bbnote, bbwarn, bbplain, bberror, and bbfatal) are now connected through to their BitBake equivalents bb.debug(), bb.note(), bb.warn(), bb.plain(), bb.error(), and bb.fatal(), respectively. Thus, those message functions that you would expect to be printed by the BitBake UI are now actually printed. In practice, this change means two things:

  • If you now see messages on the console that you did not previously see as a result of this change, you might need to clean up the calls to bbwarn, bberror, and so forth. Or, you might want to simply remove the calls.

  • The bbfatal message function now suppresses the full error log in the UI, which means any calls to bbfatal where you still wish to see the full error log should be replaced by die or bbfatal_log.

4.8.6 Extra Development/Debug Package Cleanup

The following recipes have had extra dev/dbg packages removed:

  • acl

  • apmd

  • aspell

  • attr

  • augeas

  • bzip2

  • cogl

  • curl

  • elfutils

  • gcc-target

  • libgcc

  • libtool

  • libxmu

  • opkg

  • pciutils

  • rpm

  • sysfsutils

  • tiff

  • xz

All of the above recipes now conform to the standard packaging scheme where a single -dev, -dbg, and -staticdev package exists per recipe.

4.8.7 Recipe Maintenance Tracking Data Moved to OE-Core

Maintenance tracking data for recipes that was previously part of meta-yocto has been moved to OpenEmbedded-Core (OE-Core). The change includes package_regex.inc and distro_alias.inc, which are typically enabled when using the distrodata class. Additionally, the contents of upstream_tracking.inc has now been split out to the relevant recipes.

4.8.8 Automatic Stale Sysroot File Cleanup

Stale files from recipes that no longer exist in the current configuration are now automatically removed from sysroot as well as removed from any other place managed by shared state. This automatic cleanup means that the build system now properly handles situations such as renaming the build system side of recipes, removal of layers from bblayers.conf, and DISTRO_FEATURES changes.

Additionally, work directories for old versions of recipes are now pruned. If you wish to disable pruning old work directories, you can set the following variable in your configuration:

SSTATE_PRUNE_OBSOLETEWORKDIR = "0"

4.8.9 linux-yocto Kernel Metadata Repository Now Split from Source

The linux-yocto tree has up to now been a combined set of kernel changes and configuration (meta) data carried in a single tree. While this format is effective at keeping kernel configuration and source modifications synchronized, it is not always obvious to developers how to manipulate the Metadata as compared to the source.

Metadata processing has now been removed from the kernel-yocto class and the external Metadata repository yocto-kernel-cache, which has always been used to seed the linux-yocto “meta” branch. This separate linux-yocto cache repository is now the primary location for this data. Due to this change, linux-yocto is no longer able to process combined trees. Thus, if you need to have your own combined kernel repository, you must do the split there as well and update your recipes accordingly. See the meta/recipes-kernel/linux/linux-yocto_4.1.bb recipe for an example.

4.8.10 Additional QA checks

The following QA checks have been added:

  • Added a “host-user-contaminated” check for ownership issues for packaged files outside of /home. The check looks for files that are incorrectly owned by the user that ran BitBake instead of owned by a valid user in the target system.

  • Added an “invalid-chars” check for invalid (non-UTF8) characters in recipe metadata variable values (i.e. DESCRIPTION, SUMMARY, LICENSE, and SECTION). Some package managers do not support these characters.

  • Added an “invalid-packageconfig” check for any options specified in PACKAGECONFIG that do not match any PACKAGECONFIG option defined for the recipe.

4.8.11 Miscellaneous Changes

These additional changes exist:

  • gtk-update-icon-cache has been renamed to gtk-icon-utils.

  • The tools-profile IMAGE_FEATURES item as well as its corresponding packagegroup and packagegroup-core-tools-profile no longer bring in oprofile. Bringing in oprofile was originally added to aid compilation on resource-constrained targets. However, this aid has not been widely used and is not likely to be used going forward due to the more powerful target platforms and the existence of better cross-compilation tools.

  • The IMAGE_FSTYPES variable’s default value now specifies ext4 instead of ext3.

  • All support for the PRINC variable has been removed.

  • The packagegroup-core-full-cmdline packagegroup no longer brings in lighttpd due to the fact that bringing in lighttpd is not really in line with the packagegroup’s purpose, which is to add full versions of command-line tools that by default are provided by busybox.