This article assumes, you already have development environment setup for yocto, if not please read and setup as per “Building Yocto for Raspberry Pi / Creating Embedded Linux for RPi using Yocto”
Along with recipes for building a compiler for its internal use, OpenEmbedded also has recipes to create a full toolchain / cross-compiler environment for the host. Toolchain can be build using meta-toolchain recipe which is part of “openembedded-core” meta layer, hence we will have to first add that layer as,
$ git clone git://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core
$ cd openembedded-core/
$ git checkout -b thud origin/thud
$ cd poky
$ source oe-init-build-env
Update local.conf to add openembedded-core layer which contains recipes for compiling toolchain
$ vim conf/bblayers.conf
BBLAYERS ?= " \ /home/myuser/workspace/openembedded-core \ /home/myuser/workspace/poky \
Now compile the toolchain as
$ bitbake meta-toolchain
The compilation of toolchain will take some time and its a heavy compilation which might make your development machine unresponsive based on your RAM size, you just have an option to wait, nothing else 🙂
Once the compilation is done successfully, you will see a script generated at build/tmp/deploy/sdk as,
$ ls -l tmp/deploy/sdk/ tmp/deploy/sdk/poky-glibc-x86_64-meta-toolchain-cortexa7t2hf-neon-vfpv4-toolchain-2.6.2.sh
When we want to install this toolchain, use below command or steps for installation. You can either choose the default location as shown below /opt/poky/2.6.2 or override by typing some directory name, which will be created in current working directory i.e. build. We used directory name “sdk” hence the toolchain will be installed as “build/sdk”
$ ./tmp/deploy/sdk/poky-glibc-x86_64-meta-toolchain-cortexa7t2hf-neon-vfpv4-toolchain-2.6.2.sh Poky (Yocto Project Reference Distro) SDK installer version 2.6.2 ================================================================= Enter target directory for SDK (default: /opt/poky/2.6.2): sdk You are about to install the SDK to "/home/devlab/yocto/poky/build/sdk". Proceed[Y/n]? Y Extracting SDK...........................................................................done Setting it up...done SDK has been successfully set up and is ready to be used. Each time you wish to use the SDK in a new shell session, you need to source the environment setup script e.g. $ . /home/devlab/yocto/poky/build/sdk/environment-setup-cortexa7t2hf-neon-vfpv4-poky-linux-gnueabi
As you can see above build/sdk/environment-setup-cortexa7t2hf-neon-vfpv4-poky-linux-gnueabi script is requested to be sourced to your environment since it contain all environment variables auto generated based on your installation of toolchain/sdk.
