Build Appliance Design
This page holds the design for the Yocto Project build appliance.
Usage Model
This feature is designed to make the Yocto Project much more appealing to the developer who wants to check Yocto out but may not have a recent (and supported) Linux distro installed with all of the proxies set up correctly.
The developer will download a virtual image and boot it. This image is a Linux OS which will allow the user to do a build, boot the resulting Linux in an emulator. This gives a quick experience with the system without fear of dependencies being missing. (This is needed because of the general difficulty in having something as complex as the Yocto Project be totally compatible with every conceivable Linux system.
It is a non-goal that a developer would continue to use this appliance for all day-to-day development tasks.
Goals
- Required: Total size of the image must not exceed 100 Mbytes, to make it feasible to download the image.
- Preferred: Have a second, larger image which includes all source and sstate-cache preinstalled, but may be much larger.
- Preferred: VMWare ESX image. VMWare is known to correctly build whereas recent versions of Virtual Box and others are not.
- Required: Must have Linux plus all prerequisite packages installed to make a build work.
- Preferred: Generate the OS in the appliance with Yocto. (Thus, make it a self-hosted build appliance)
- Preferred: When the image boots, it boots up Hob and also has a terminal for launching QEMU or deploying the image
- Preferred: In addition to Hob, there is GUI support for deploying the image on a board and / or boot it into QEMU
Design Notes
(To be filled in with additional design comments)
