Enable sstate cache

sstate background

To speed up the build process, sstate provides a cache mechanism, where sstate files from server can be reused to avoid build from scratch if the producer and consumer of the sstate has same environment. With perfect case, we can achieve more than 80% time decreasing.

use sstate cache server

Another build machine is needed to produce the sstate file periodically. The default sstate files directory is sstate-cache under build dir, which is needed to be exported via NFS, http or ftp server.

On your local machine, change the conf/local.conf as following:

SSTATE_MIRRORS ?= "\
file://.* http://someserver.tld/share/sstate/"

for NFS server

SSTATE_MIRRORS ?= "\
file://.* file:///local/mounted/dir/sstate/"

Use local sstate cache

You can make all the builds pointing to the same SSTATE_DIR to share sstate files between them, like this:

SSTATE_DIR ?= "/share/sstate-cache"

So that each build would consume the sstate file if match, and produce new sstate file if not match.

Verify the sstate is working

If sstate works, you can see something like:

NOTE: Preparing runqueue
NOTE: Executing SetScene Tasks
NOTE: Running setscene task 118 of 155 (virtual:native:/home/lulianhao/poky-build/edwin/poky/meta/recipes-devtools/pseudo/pseudo_git.bb:do_populate_sysroot_setscene)
NOTE: Running setscene task 119 of 155 (/home/lulianhao/poky-build/edwin/poky/meta/recipes-devtools/quilt/quilt-native_0.48.bb:do_populate_sysroot_setscene)

If there is no setscene tasks running, sstate cache can't be used because sstate function got broken or some environment value changes invalidate sstate cache. You can use following tools to check any changes between sstate cache and new produced one.

 #bitbake-diffsigs /mnt/sstate/sstate-packagename-checksum1-tgz.siginfo builddir/sstate-cache/sstate-packagename-checksum2-tgz.siginfo

know issues

• Various build distributions may lead to checksum mismatch
• New changeset may invalidate whole sstate cache occasionally
• Native package’s sstate cache can’t be reused among 32bit and 64bit host
• Missing sstate file on http/ftp server cause wget hang for a long time due to the retries and timeout