On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 10:44 PM Brian Hutchinson <b.hutchman@...> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 01:22 PM, Andrey Zhizhikin wrote:

Hello Brian,

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 9:51 PM Brian Hutchinson <b.hutchman@...> wrote:

... what "distro" 'should' I be using since I have a custom board that's based on imx8mm evk but I don't necessarily want/need wifi, bluetooth, video, touchscreen etc.???

I suggest you go with your own distro then, as you can leverage the
DISTRO_FEATURES in it yourself. You can either take any of 'fsl-'
prefixed distros over 'poky' if you need some NXP proprietary
components (e.g. VPU, GPU, etc), or take any of 'fslc-' prefixed ones
if you want to stay with mainline. Please note - I do not say that
'poky' would not work here! :) It is just a reference distro from
Yocto Project, which targets qemu on the first place, but also works
well for real HW.

This is the way we build our distro (derived from 'fsl-wayland'), and
so far it has proven to be working quite well. I also do sanity build
and run the 'fsl-wayland' off the master on imx8mmevk to make sure
there are no regressions.

When I did NXP released builds I would use fsl-wayland distro but if memory serves me right a core-image-minimal would not boot. Only core-image-base images did and they were quite large.

I do need to create my own distro but kind of would like to start from core-image-minimal and build up rather than take something like fsl-wayland and try to figure out what I don't need. Being new to NXP family this approach "feels" more logical.

I think you're mixing up 2 conceptual points here: distro vs image.
You can have a wayland distro, but only include a handful of packages
and features of it into the image. Distro does not define the content
of the image, image recipe does.

Section 4.3.2. of Yocto Overview Manual gives a very nice overview of
those concepts:
https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/3.1.2/overview-manual/overview-manual.html#metadata-machine-configuration-and-policy-configuration

Is poky what's causing my pain?

You can see what distro features you have included when you do
'bitbake -e' and search for DISTRO_FEATURES. If you have (and
according to what you say - you do :) ) some pieces you do not need -
you can always either not include them in your custom distro, or use
DISTRO_FEATURES_remove = "<unneeded list>".

I've been doing TI based builds forever and recently switched over to NXP based products so still learning the lay of the land. I finally discovered I don't think I want to be building based off NXP releases from codeaurora and that Freescale is the better base for our products but not 100% clear what distro's are available and which ones I should focus on.

Those distros are located in a meta-freescale-distro layer, you can
peek there to see what's available.

I'll look. Thanks

Regards,

Brian

--
Regards,
Andrey.

Hello Brian,

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 10:44 PM Brian Hutchinson <b.hutchman@...> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 01:22 PM, Andrey Zhizhikin wrote:

Hello Brian,

On Tue, Oct 6, 2020 at 9:51 PM Brian Hutchinson <b.hutchman@...> wrote:

... what "distro" 'should' I be using since I have a custom board that's based on imx8mm evk but I don't necessarily want/need wifi, bluetooth, video, touchscreen etc.???

I suggest you go with your own distro then, as you can leverage the
DISTRO_FEATURES in it yourself. You can either take any of 'fsl-'
prefixed distros over 'poky' if you need some NXP proprietary
components (e.g. VPU, GPU, etc), or take any of 'fslc-' prefixed ones
if you want to stay with mainline. Please note - I do not say that
'poky' would not work here! :) It is just a reference distro from
Yocto Project, which targets qemu on the first place, but also works
well for real HW.

This is the way we build our distro (derived from 'fsl-wayland'), and
so far it has proven to be working quite well. I also do sanity build
and run the 'fsl-wayland' off the master on imx8mmevk to make sure
there are no regressions.

When I did NXP released builds I would use fsl-wayland distro but if memory serves me right a core-image-minimal would not boot. Only core-image-base images did and they were quite large.

I just did a following build:
$ MACHINE=imx8mmevk DISTRO=fsl-wayland bitbake core-image-minimal

Image produced boots fine on i.MX8M Mini EVK.

Runtime device info:
# cat /etc/os-release
ID=fsl-wayland
NAME="FSL Wayland"
VERSION="3.2-snapshot-20201008 (master)"
VERSION_ID=3.2-snapshot-20201008
PRETTY_NAME="FSL Wayland 3.2-snapshot-20201008 (master)"

# uname -a
Linux imx8mmevk 5.4.24+gbabac008e5cf #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat May 30
07:25:46 UTC 2020 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Please note: with this configuration you would get a kernel from NXP
(versioned 5.4.24). If you would like to utilize the NXP kernel with
latest stable patch level, you should switch
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel_mx8mm = "linux-imx" to
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel_mx8mm = "linux-imx-fslc"

.

I do need to create my own distro but kind of would like to start from core-image-minimal and build up rather than take something like fsl-wayland and try to figure out what I don't need. Being new to NXP family this approach "feels" more logical.

Is poky what's causing my pain?

You can see what distro features you have included when you do
'bitbake -e' and search for DISTRO_FEATURES. If you have (and
according to what you say - you do :) ) some pieces you do not need -
you can always either not include them in your custom distro, or use
DISTRO_FEATURES_remove = "<unneeded list>".

I've been doing TI based builds forever and recently switched over to NXP based products so still learning the lay of the land. I finally discovered I don't think I want to be building based off NXP releases from codeaurora and that Freescale is the better base for our products but not 100% clear what distro's are available and which ones I should focus on.

Those distros are located in a meta-freescale-distro layer, you can
peek there to see what's available.

I'll look. Thanks

Regards,

Brian

--
Regards,
Andrey.

Hello all,

Em qui., 8 de out. de 2020 às 06:10, Andrey Zhizhikin
<andrey.z@...> escreveu:

Please note: with this configuration you would get a kernel from NXP
(versioned 5.4.24). If you would like to utilize the NXP kernel with
latest stable patch level, you should switch
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel_mx8mm = "linux-imx" to
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel_mx8mm = "linux-imx-fslc"

For all i.MX8 the fslc distributions use the NXP BSP by default so
using 'fslc-wayland' should work just fine.

...

You can see what distro features you have included when you do
'bitbake -e' and search for DISTRO_FEATURES. If you have (and
according to what you say - you do :) ) some pieces you do not need -
you can always either not include them in your custom distro, or use
DISTRO_FEATURES_remove = "<unneeded list>".

I've been doing TI based builds forever and recently switched over to NXP based products so still learning the lay of the land. I finally discovered I don't think I want to be building based off NXP releases from codeaurora and that Freescale is the better base for our products but not 100% clear what distro's are available and which ones I should focus on.

Those distros are located in a meta-freescale-distro layer, you can
peek there to see what's available.

I'll look. Thanks

For products we, at O.S. Systems, have been using our OEL[1]
distribution as a baseline where we create the product specific one.

1. https://github.com/OSSystemsEmbeddedLinux/ossystems-embedded-linux-platform

--
Otavio Salvador O.S. Systems
http://www.ossystems.com.br http://code.ossystems.com.br
Mobile: +55 (53) 9 9981-7854 Mobile: +1 (347) 903-9750