Release 1.6 (daisy)

This section provides migration information for moving to the Yocto Project 1.6 Release (codename “daisy”) from the prior release.

archiver Class

The archiver class has been rewritten and its configuration has been simplified. For more details on the source archiver, see the “Maintaining Open Source License Compliance During Your Product’s Lifecycle” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.

Packaging Changes

The following packaging changes have been made:

  • The binutils recipe no longer produces a binutils-symlinks package. update-alternatives is now used to handle the preferred binutils variant on the target instead.

  • The tc (traffic control) utilities have been split out of the main iproute2 package and put into the iproute2-tc package.

  • The gtk-engines schemas have been moved to a dedicated gtk-engines-schemas package.

  • The armv7a with thumb package architecture suffix has changed. The suffix for these packages with the thumb optimization enabled is “t2” as it should be. Use of this suffix was not the case in the 1.5 release. Architecture names will change within package feeds as a result.

BitBake

The following changes have been made to BitBake.

Matching Branch Requirement for Git Fetching

When fetching source from a Git repository using SRC_URI, BitBake will now validate the SRCREV value against the branch. You can specify the branch using the following form:

SRC_URI = "git://server.name/repository;branch=branchname"

If you do not specify a branch, BitBake looks in the default “master” branch.

Alternatively, if you need to bypass this check (e.g. if you are fetching a revision corresponding to a tag that is not on any branch), you can add “;nobranch=1” to the end of the URL within SRC_URI.

Python Definition substitutions

BitBake had some previously deprecated Python definitions within its bb module removed. You should use their sub-module counterparts instead:

  • bb.MalformedUrl: Use bb.fetch.MalformedUrl.

  • bb.encodeurl: Use bb.fetch.encodeurl.

  • bb.decodeurl: Use bb.fetch.decodeurl

  • bb.mkdirhier: Use bb.utils.mkdirhier.

  • bb.movefile: Use bb.utils.movefile.

  • bb.copyfile: Use bb.utils.copyfile.

  • bb.which: Use bb.utils.which.

  • bb.vercmp_string: Use bb.utils.vercmp_string.

  • bb.vercmp: Use bb.utils.vercmp.

SVK Fetcher

The SVK fetcher has been removed from BitBake.

Console Output Error Redirection

The BitBake console UI will now output errors to stderr instead of stdout. Consequently, if you are piping or redirecting the output of bitbake to somewhere else, and you wish to retain the errors, you will need to add 2>&1 (or something similar) to the end of your bitbake command line.

task-taskname Overrides

task-taskname overrides have been adjusted so that tasks whose names contain underscores have the underscores replaced by hyphens for the override so that they now function properly. For example, the task override for do_populate_sdk is task-populate-sdk.

Changes to Variables

The following variables have changed. For information on the OpenEmbedded build system variables, see the “Variables Glossary” Chapter.

TMPDIR

TMPDIR can no longer be on an NFS mount. NFS does not offer full POSIX locking and inode consistency and can cause unexpected issues if used to store TMPDIR.

The check for this occurs on startup. If TMPDIR is detected on an NFS mount, an error occurs.

PRINC

The PRINC variable has been deprecated and triggers a warning if detected during a build. For PR increments on changes, use the PR service instead. You can find out more about this service in the “Working With a PR Service” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual.

IMAGE_TYPES

The “sum.jffs2” option for IMAGE_TYPES has been replaced by the “jffs2.sum” option, which fits the processing order.

COPY_LIC_MANIFEST

The COPY_LIC_MANIFEST variable must now be set to “1” rather than any value in order to enable it.

COPY_LIC_DIRS

The COPY_LIC_DIRS variable must now be set to “1” rather than any value in order to enable it.

PACKAGE_GROUP

The PACKAGE_GROUP variable has been renamed to FEATURE_PACKAGES to more accurately reflect its purpose. You can still use PACKAGE_GROUP but the OpenEmbedded build system produces a warning message when it encounters the variable.

Preprocess and Post Process Command Variable Behavior

The following variables now expect a semicolon separated list of functions to call and not arbitrary shell commands:

For migration purposes, you can simply wrap shell commands in a shell function and then call the function. Here is an example:

my_postprocess_function() {
   echo "hello" > ${IMAGE_ROOTFS}/hello.txt
}
ROOTFS_POSTPROCESS_COMMAND += "my_postprocess_function; "

Package Test (ptest)

Package Tests (ptest) are built but not installed by default. For information on using Package Tests, see the “Testing Packages With ptest” section in the Yocto Project Development Tasks Manual. For information on the ptest class, see the “ptest” section.

Build Changes

Separate build and source directories have been enabled by default for selected recipes where it is known to work and for all recipes that inherit the cmake class. In future releases the autotools class will enable a separate build directory by default as well. Recipes building Autotools-based software that fails to build with a separate build directory should be changed to inherit from the autotools-brokensep class instead of the autotools or autotools_stageclasses.

qemu-native

qemu-native now builds without SDL-based graphical output support by default. The following additional lines are needed in your local.conf to enable it:

PACKAGECONFIG_pn-qemu-native = "sdl"
ASSUME_PROVIDED += "libsdl-native"

Note

The default local.conf contains these statements. Consequently, if you are building a headless system and using a default local.conf file, you will need comment these two lines out.

core-image-basic

core-image-basic has been renamed to core-image-full-cmdline.

In addition to core-image-basic being renamed, packagegroup-core-basic has been renamed to packagegroup-core-full-cmdline to match.

Licensing

The top-level LICENSE file has been changed to better describe the license of the various components of OpenEmbedded-Core (OE-Core). However, the licensing itself remains unchanged.

Normally, this change would not cause any side-effects. However, some recipes point to this file within LIC_FILES_CHKSUM (as ${COREBASE}/LICENSE) and thus the accompanying checksum must be changed from 3f40d7994397109285ec7b81fdeb3b58 to 4d92cd373abda3937c2bc47fbc49d690. A better alternative is to have LIC_FILES_CHKSUM point to a file describing the license that is distributed with the source that the recipe is building, if possible, rather than pointing to ${COREBASE}/LICENSE.

CFLAGS Options

The “-fpermissive” option has been removed from the default CFLAGS value. You need to take action on individual recipes that fail when building with this option. You need to either patch the recipes to fix the issues reported by the compiler, or you need to add “-fpermissive” to CFLAGS in the recipes.

Custom Image Output Types

Custom image output types, as selected using IMAGE_FSTYPES, must declare their dependencies on other image types (if any) using a new IMAGE_TYPEDEP variable.

Tasks

The do_package_write task has been removed. The task is no longer needed.

update-alternative Provider

The default update-alternatives provider has been changed from opkg to opkg-utils. This change resolves some troublesome circular dependencies. The runtime package has also been renamed from update-alternatives-cworth to update-alternatives-opkg.

virtclass Overrides

The virtclass overrides are now deprecated. Use the equivalent class overrides instead (e.g. virtclass-native becomes class-native.)

Removed and Renamed Recipes

The following recipes have been removed:

  • packagegroup-toolset-native - This recipe is largely unused.

  • linux-yocto-3.8 - Support for the Linux yocto 3.8 kernel has been dropped. Support for the 3.10 and 3.14 kernels have been added with the linux-yocto-3.10 and linux-yocto-3.14 recipes.

  • ocf-linux - This recipe has been functionally replaced using cryptodev-linux.

  • genext2fs - genext2fs is no longer used by the build system and is unmaintained upstream.

  • js - This provided an ancient version of Mozilla’s javascript engine that is no longer needed.

  • zaurusd - The recipe has been moved to the meta-handheld layer.

  • eglibc 2.17 - Replaced by the eglibc 2.19 recipe.

  • gcc 4.7.2 - Replaced by the now stable gcc 4.8.2.

  • external-sourcery-toolchain - this recipe is now maintained in the meta-sourcery layer.

  • linux-libc-headers-yocto 3.4+git - Now using version 3.10 of the linux-libc-headers by default.

  • meta-toolchain-gmae - This recipe is obsolete.

  • packagegroup-core-sdk-gmae - This recipe is obsolete.

  • packagegroup-core-standalone-gmae-sdk-target - This recipe is obsolete.

Removed Classes

The following classes have become obsolete and have been removed:

  • module_strip

  • pkg_metainfo

  • pkg_distribute

  • image-empty

Reference Board Support Packages (BSPs)

The following reference BSPs changes occurred:

  • The BeagleBoard (beagleboard) ARM reference hardware has been replaced by the BeagleBone (beaglebone) hardware.

  • The RouterStation Pro (routerstationpro) MIPS reference hardware has been replaced by the EdgeRouter Lite (edgerouter) hardware.

The previous reference BSPs for the beagleboard and routerstationpro machines are still available in a new meta-yocto-bsp-old layer in the Source Repositories at https://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/meta-yocto-bsp-old/.