Building IOT-GATE-iMX8 and SBC-IOT-iMX8 Yocto Linux images

Overview

Yocto Project is an open-source collaboration focused on embedded Linux development.
The purpose of this article is to show how to build Yocto Linux images for the CompuLab IOT-GATE-iMX8 and SBC-IOT-iMX8.

Learn more about Yocto

Yocto Environment Setup

Yocto host requirements are listed on the Yocto official site

In order to get NXP Yocto BSP building environment please issue the following commands. More detailed instructions can be found in the NXP readme file

repo init -u git://source.codeaurora.org/external/imx/imx-manifest.git -b imx-linux-zeus -m imx-5.4.24-2.1.0.xml
repo sync

The next step is getting the Compulab BSP meta-layer:

git clone -b iot-gate-imx8_r2.2 https://github.com/compulab-yokneam/meta-bsp-imx8mm.git sources/meta-bsp-imx8mm/

The Compulab meta-layer consists of meta-compulab directory, that provides support for IOT-GATE-iMX8/SBC-IOT-iMX8 and other Compulab i.MX based machines and contains recipes for U-boot and Linux kernel.

Image Building

Create Build Environment

• Issue Compulab setup script:

MACHINE=iot-gate-imx8 DISTRO=fsl-imx-xwayland  source sources/meta-bsp-imx8mm/tools/setup-imx8mm-env -b build-cmdline

Building the images

The Yocto Project build uses the bitbake command.

bitbake -k core-image-full-cmdline

• To re-build only the Linux kernel use the following command:

source setup-environment build-xwayland
bitbake -c cleansstate linux-imx
bitbake -k linux-imx

• To re-build only the u-boot bootloader and boot image use the following command:

source setup-environment build-xwayland
bitbake -c cleansstate imx-boot u-boot-imx
bitbake -k imx-boot u-boot-imx