TipsAndTricks/CropsCLIContainers

CROPS or How to Run bitbake/devtool/eSDK/Toaster on Your MacWinux Host

Introduction

CROPS provides CLI containers that allow you to run the set of tools listed in the title on Mac OSX, Windows or Linux. The containers themselves are available on Dockerhub at https://hub.docker.com/u/crops/dashboard/

You may wonder why you would use these containers on Linux. The main reason is it gives you a guaranteed clean environment from which to build. Also it means you don't need to install the dependent packages required by the build tools. Measurements show no speed degradation when running in the container.

How to Get Started

The setup on Mac and Windows requires some extra steps before you get up and running. This is due to the fact that neither the Mac nor the Windows file systems support all the features we need to do a build. To deal with this issue on these OS's we put the build into a persistent docker volume (https://docs.docker.com/engine/tutorials/dockervolumes/) and expose it to the host OS using a Samba container. The detailed instructions for doing this are located at https://github.com/crops/docker-win-mac-docs/wiki

If you plan to use these containers on Linux, you can skip the docker volume and the Samba container instructions as they are unnecessary. The detailed instructions for running the various containers are located in the README.md for each container source on github. Pointers to these instructions for the Poky,eSDK, and Toaster containers are located at the bottom of the above referenced wiki.
NOTE: ALL the CROPS containers take a --help argument in case you forget the options! For example:

 docker run -it --rm crops/poky --help

usage: poky-entry.py [-h] [--workdir WORKDIR] [--id ID]
optional arguments:
 -h, --help         show this help message and exit
 --workdir WORKDIR  The active directory once the container is running. In
                    the abscence of the "id" argument, the uid and gid of the
                    workdir will also be used for the user in the container.
 --id ID            uid and gid to use for the user inside the container. It
                    should be in the form uid:gid

Variations Explained

Poky

The default Poky container is quite generic and will work with most recent releases of YP. Despite the name, it simply contains all the dependent packages required by Poky but not the meta-data. It will work equally well for an OE Core setup. The default container is based on Ubuntu-14.04. We are in the process of creating ones based on the rest of the standard supported Linux Distro's. For the common usage; however, which Distro is inside is irrelevant since everything is already set up for the user.

eSDK

The eSDK container is also generic in that it takes an extensible sdk install script as an argument so it can be used with a fairly arbitrary ext-sdk.

Toaster

Toaster is more complicated. To facilitate quick startup, the Toaster containers include a database prepopulated from the layer index https://layers.openembedded.org. Because of this, the toaster containers come in a couple of varieties.

• Toaster - https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster/ - This is the last official release YP has available. At the time of writing this T&T, for instance, this is krogoth and will soon be morty.
• Toaster-krogoth - https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster-krogoth - The krogoth release.
• Toaster -morty - https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster-morty/ - The RC release. We created this once the morty branch was named/made.
• Toaster-master - https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster-master/ - This is the ever changing master version. A new image is built for every commit to http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/ on the master branch. We keep ~ 2 weeks back. A docker pull toaster-master will give you the latest commit. If you want a particular commit, look at the tags page: https://hub.docker.com/r/crops/toaster-master/tags/ and you see a number of options.
  • latest - the last successful (passed the Travis test viewable at https://travis-ci.org/crops/toaster-container )
  • latest-<date>-<commitish> - the latest tag points to the last of these. We also keep old ones around for ~ 2 weeks.
  • toaster-next-<date>-<commitish> - This is built using the toaster-next branch of poky-contrib http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/?h=toaster-next. This is intended for people actively developing toaster source code itself.