This guide will go through setting up a build environment and building an x86_64 image, and adding a small „hello world“ application to it. First the application will be compiled using the SDK , then it will be added to the image directly by creating a recipe .

Create a directory in a suitable place to store everything related to this build. This guide will assume everything is in a directory called yocto in your the home of the user ubuntu: /home/ubuntu/yocto. This folder can by anywhere on the system though.

Next, clone poky, yocto's reference distribution. At the time of writing yocto-3.0.2 is the newest release, feel free to substitute it for a newer/different version.

git clone -b yocto-3.0.2 git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky

Next, create a build directory:

mkdir build

Now we can initialize yocto using:

. poky/oe-init-build-env build/

This will populate the build directory with all necessary files and give you access to bitbake, the build system used by yocto .

Setting the machine tells bitbake what hardware to build for. This build will be a generic x86_64 image, so we can set the machine to genericx86-64.

Open local.conf

nano conf/local.conf

and add this line to set the machhine:

MACHINE = "genericx86-64"

The build environment is now set up.

You can now build an image. This command will build a minimal image provided by poky:

bitbake core-image-minimal