Building Yocto for your custom hardware

A good starting point is to use a yocto distribution supplied by the SoM/Board/CPU manufacturer. This ensures you have a working Linux distribution before starting to add EVerest.

Many SoM manufacturers provide quite well-maintained Yocto distributions, e.g. PHYTEC provides an ampliPHY distribution for all of their SoMs. That already solves a lot of things. We will look at that in the next chapters.

Tip

The SoM manufacturer may also already provide suitable build containers or other tools to help with integration into your CI/CD.

After the basic setup is done, you most likely will need to adapt the device tree to your custom board to mux all pins correctly and map Linux kernel drivers to the correct peripherals.

Once it boots correctly and all hardware is initialized in the kernel, you can start with adding the meta-everest Yocto layer to your bblayers.conf. You may also want to create your own layer for your image files, EVerest config files, recipes for your own software etc. Look at meta-everest as an example and refer to the Yocto documentation:

https://docs.yoctoproject.org/dev/dev-manual/layers.html https://github.com/EVerest/meta-everest

Then - in case you have not done it yet - create a custom image file for your board that installs EVerest as well as all other tools you may want to have on your base system. This image can be based e.g. on core-image-minimal. Here is an an example from the BelayBox:

require recipes-core/images/core-image-minimal.bb

SUMMARY = "EVerest image for PIONIX BelayBox development kit"

LICENSE = "MIT"

CORE_IMAGE_EXTRA_INSTALL += "\
        everest-core \
        libocpp \
        openssh \
        mosquitto \
        tzdata \
        pionixbox \
        flutter-pi \
        flutter-engine \
        fontconfig \
        ttf-roboto \
        htop \
        tmux \
    "

The minimal required packages are everest-core and mosquitto. The package tmux is only needed for the BringUp & Qualification tools. Other debugging tools that may be useful during development phase are:

tcpdump
canutils
tpm-tools
open-plc-utils
ethtool

Note

The locale should be set to UTF-8 (otherwise BringUp & Qualification tools will look weird).

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Authors: Cornelius Claussen, Manuel Ziegler