Tag: OpenEmbedded

Openembedded Yocto Native Hello World: Take 2

~ flihp ~ 1 Comment

A while back I wrote about some problems I was having with native OpenEmbedded recipes that were building packages with raw Makefiles (no autotools). I wrote up the problem and the work around I was using here. I got some feedback pointing out what I was doing wrong but I guess my brain just didn’t process it. I was using uppercase variables while the GNU Make docs specifically call for lowercase! These variables get magically passed to Make likely through the environment and then everything just works.

So here’s my retraction: I was wrong 🙂 The ‘hello world’ Makefile should look like this:

.PHONY : clean uninstall

prefix ?= /usr
exec_prefix ?= $(prefix)
bindir ?= $(exec_prefix)/bin

HELLO_src = hello.c
HELLO_bin = hello
HELLO_tgt = $(DESTDIR)$(bindir)/$(HELLO_bin)

all : $(HELLO_bin)

$(HELLO_bin) : $(HELLO_src)

$(HELLO_tgt) : $(HELLO_bin)
	install -d $(DESTDIR)$(bindir)
	install -m 0755 $^ $@

clean :
	rm $(HELLO_bin)

install : $(HELLO_tgt)

uninstall :
	rm $(HELLO_TGT)

You can download the recipe here: hello_1.1.bb.

openembedded yocto native hello world

~ flihp ~ 5 Comments

NOTE: I took the time to get to the bottom of the issue discussed in this post. There’s a new post here that explains the “right way” to use Makefiles with yocto. As always, the error in this post was mine 🙂

I’ve officially “drank the Kool-Aid” and I’m convinced openembedde and Yocto are pretty awesome. I’ve had a blast building small Debian systems on PCEngines hardware in the past and while I’m waiting for my Raspberry Pi to arrive I’ve been trying to learn the ins and outs of Yocto. The added bonus is that the XenClient team at Citrix uses openembedded for our build system so this work can also fall under the heading of “professional development”.

Naturally the first task I took on was way too complicated so I made a bunch of great progress (more about that in a future post once I get it stable) but then I hit a wall that I ended up banging my head against for a full day. I posted a cry for help on the mailing list and didn’t get any responses so I set out to remove as many moving parts as possible and find the root cause.

First things first read the Yocto development manual and the Yocto reference for whatever release you’re using. This is essential because no one will help you till you’ve read and understand these 🙂

So the software I’m trying to build is built using raw Makefiles, none of that fancy autotools stuff. This can be a bit of a pain because depending on the Makefiles, it’s not uncommon for assumptions to be made about file system paths. Openembedded is all about cross compiling so it wants to build and install software under all sorts of strange roots and some Makefiles just can’t handle this. I ran into a few of these scenarios but nothing I couldn’t overcome.

Getting a package for my target architecture wasn’t bad but I did run into a nasty problem when I tried to get a native package built. From the searches I did on the interwebs it looks like there have been a number of ways to build native packages. The current “right way” is simply to have your recipe extend the native class. Thanks to XorA for documenting his/her new package workflow for that nugget.

BBCLASSEXTEND = "native"

After having this method blow up for my recipe I was tempted to hack together some crazy work around. I really want to upstream the stuff I’m working on though and I figure having crazy shit in my recipe to work around my misunderstanding of the native class was setting the whole thing up for failure. So instead I went back to basics and made a “hello world” program and recipe (included at the end of this post) hoping to recreate the error and hopefully figure out what I was doing wrong at the same time.

It took a bit of extra work but I was able to recreate the issue with a very simple Makefile. First the error message:

NOTE: package hello-native-1.0-r0: task do_populate_sysroot: Started
ERROR: Error executing a python function in /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta-test/recipes-test/helloworld/hello_1.0.bb:
CalledProcessError: Command 'tar -cf - -C /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/work/i686-linux/hello-native-1.0-r0/sysroot-destdir///home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i
686-linux -ps . | tar -xf - -C /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux' returned non-zero exit status 2 with output tar: /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/work
/i686-linux/hello-native-1.0-r0/sysroot-destdir///home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux: Cannot chdir: No such file or directory
tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
tar: This does not look like a tar archive
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors


ERROR: The stack trace of python calls that resulted in this exception/failure was:
ERROR:   File "sstate_task_postfunc", line 10, in 
ERROR:
ERROR:   File "sstate_task_postfunc", line 4, in sstate_task_postfunc
ERROR:
ERROR:   File "sstate.bbclass", line 19, in sstate_install
ERROR:
ERROR:   File "/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta/lib/oe/path.py", line 59, in copytree
ERROR:     check_output(cmd, shell=True, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
ERROR:
ERROR:   File "/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta/lib/oe/path.py", line 121, in check_output
ERROR:     raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd, output=output)
ERROR:
ERROR: The code that was being executed was:
ERROR:      0006:        bb.build.exec_func(intercept, d)
ERROR:      0007:    sstate_package(shared_state, d)
ERROR:      0008:
ERROR:      0009:
ERROR:  *** 0010:sstate_task_postfunc(d)
ERROR:      0011:
ERROR: (file: 'sstate_task_postfunc', lineno: 10, function: )
ERROR:      0001:
ERROR:      0002:def sstate_task_postfunc(d):
ERROR:      0003:    shared_state = sstate_state_fromvars(d)
ERROR:  *** 0004:    sstate_install(shared_state, d)
ERROR:      0005:    for intercept in shared_state['interceptfuncs']:
ERROR:      0006:        bb.build.exec_func(intercept, d)
ERROR:      0007:    sstate_package(shared_state, d)
ERROR:      0008:
ERROR: (file: 'sstate_task_postfunc', lineno: 4, function: sstate_task_postfunc)
ERROR: Function 'sstate_task_postfunc' failed
ERROR: Logfile of failure stored in: /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/work/i686-linux/hello-native-1.0-r0/temp/log.do_populate_sysroot.30718
Log data follows:
| NOTE: QA checking staging
| ERROR: Error executing a python function in /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta-test/recipes-test/helloworld/hello_1.0.bb:
| CalledProcessError: Command 'tar -cf - -C /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/work/i686-linux/hello-native-1.0-r0/sysroot-destdir///home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots
/i686-linux -ps . | tar -xf - -C /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux' returned non-zero exit status 2 with output tar: /home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/wo
rk/i686-linux/hello-native-1.0-r0/sysroot-destdir///home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux: Cannot chdir: No such file or directory
| tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
| tar: This does not look like a tar archive
| tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors
|
|
| ERROR: The stack trace of python calls that resulted in this exception/failure was:
| ERROR:   File "sstate_task_postfunc", line 10, in 
| ERROR:
| ERROR:   File "sstate_task_postfunc", line 4, in sstate_task_postfunc
| ERROR:
| ERROR:   File "sstate.bbclass", line 19, in sstate_install
| ERROR:
| ERROR:   File "/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta/lib/oe/path.py", line 59, in copytree
| ERROR:     check_output(cmd, shell=True, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT)
| ERROR:
| ERROR:   File "/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta/lib/oe/path.py", line 121, in check_output
| ERROR:     raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd, output=output)
| ERROR:
| ERROR: The code that was being executed was:
| ERROR:      0006:        bb.build.exec_func(intercept, d)
| ERROR:      0007:    sstate_package(shared_state, d)
| ERROR:      0008:
| ERROR:      0009:
| ERROR:  *** 0010:sstate_task_postfunc(d)
| ERROR:      0011:
| ERROR: (file: 'sstate_task_postfunc', lineno: 10, function: )
| ERROR:      0001:
| ERROR:      0002:def sstate_task_postfunc(d):
| ERROR:      0003:    shared_state = sstate_state_fromvars(d)
| ERROR:  *** 0004:    sstate_install(shared_state, d)
| ERROR:      0005:    for intercept in shared_state['interceptfuncs']:
| ERROR:      0006:        bb.build.exec_func(intercept, d)
| ERROR:      0007:    sstate_package(shared_state, d)
| ERROR:      0008:
| ERROR: (file: 'sstate_task_postfunc', lineno: 4, function: sstate_task_postfunc)
| ERROR: Function 'sstate_task_postfunc' failed
NOTE: package hello-native-1.0-r0: task do_populate_sysroot: Failed
ERROR: Task 3 (virtual:native:/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta-test/recipes-test/helloworld/hello_1.0.bb, do_populate_sysroot) failed with exit code '1'
ERROR: 'virtual:native:/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta-test/recipes-test/helloworld/hello_1.0.bb' failed

So even with the most simple Makefile I could cause a native recipe build to blow up. Here’s the Makefile:

.PHONY : all clean install uninstall

PREFIX ?= $(DESTDIR)/usr
BINDIR ?= $(PREFIX)/bin

HELLO_src = hello.c
HELLO_bin = hello
HELLO_tgt = $(BINDIR)/$(HELLO_bin)

all : $(HELLO_bin)

$(HELLO_bin) : $(HELLO_src)

$(HELLO_tgt) : $(HELLO_bin)
	install -d $(BINDIR)
	install -m 0755 $^ $@

clean :
	rm $(HELLO_bin)

install : $(HELLO_tgt)

uninstall :
	rm $(BINDIR)/$(HELLO_tgt)

And here’s the relevant install method from the bitbake recipe:

do_install () {
    oe_runmake DESTDIR=${D} install
}

Notice I’m using the variable DESTDIR to tell the Makefile the root (not just /) to install things to. This should work right? It works for a regular package but not for a native one! This drove me nuts for a full day.

The solution to this problem lies in some weirdness in the Yocto native class when combined with the populate_sysroot method. The way I figured this out was by inspecting the differences in the environment when building hello vs hello-native. When building the regular package for the target architecture variables like bindir and sbindir were what I would expect them to be:

bindir="/usr/bin"
sbindir="/usr/sbin"

but when building hello-native they get a bit crazy:

bindir="/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux/usr/bin"
sbindir="/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux/usr/sbin"

This is a hint at the source of crazy path that staging is trying to tar up above in the error message. Further if you look in the build directory for a regular target arch package you’ll see your files where you expect in ${D}sysroot-destdir/usr/bin but for a native build you’ll see stuff in ${D}sysroot-destdir/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/build/tmp/sysroots/i686-linux/usr/bin. Pretty crazy right? I’m sure there’s a technical reason for this but it’s beyond me.

So the way you can work around this is by telling your Makefiles about paths like bindir through the recipe. A fixed do_install would look like this:

do_install () {
    oe_runmake DESTDIR=${D} BINDIR=${D}${bindir} install
}

For more complicated Makefiles you can probably specify a PREFIX and set this equal to the ${prefix} variable but YMMV. I’ll be trying this out to keep my recipes as simple as possible.

If you want to download my example the recipe is here. This will pull down the hello world source code and build the whole thing for you.

OE-Core Yocto gcc timeout

~ flihp ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been thrashing around trying to get the upstream OE to build an image for me. Today I finally made a concerted effort over a few hours to dive deep and do this right. It turns out I was using the “old” OE repos when I should have been using the “new” build system from the Yocto Project. Their documentation is excellent but still, my first build failed.

What’s this? The GCC recipe failing because of a network timeout? Oddly enough it actually downloaded some of the sources but not all of ’em.

| svn: REPORT of '/svn/gcc/!svn/vcc/default': Could not read response body: connection was closed by server (http://gcc.gnu.org)
NOTE: package gcc-cross-initial-4.6.1+svnr175454-r10: task do_fetch: Failed
ERROR: Task 5 (/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta/recipes-devtools/gcc/gcc-cross-initial_4.6.bb, do_fetch) failed with exit code '1'
ERROR: '/home/build/poky-edison-6.0/meta/recipes-devtools/gcc/gcc-cross-initial_4.6.bb' failed

At this point I just tried again and it failed in the same place but had checked out more of the code. A quick search turns up a similar error is common when checking out code from SVN servers over HTTP. Apache just has a tendency to timeout when checking out large repositories with mod-svn. The suggested fix is to increase the timeout value in your Apache configs … except these configs are on the GNU web servers and we can’t change them.

What we can change though is the protocol bitbake uses when getting the sources. Just change the proto from ‘http’ to ‘svn’ in the SRC_URI in gcc-4.6.inc (found at /meta/recipes-devtools/gcc/gcc-4.6.inc and we’re almost good. It’ll look like this when you’re done.


SRC_URI = "svn://gcc.gnu.org/svn/gcc/branches;module=${BRANCH};proto=svn

It still timed out for me a few times but it ran for much longer than the HTTP protocol option. HTTP timed out after about 10 minutes, SVN made it almost an hour before timing out … You’d think there would be a tarball of these sources mirrored somewhere so we didn’t have to kill the GNU SVN servers on every fresh build. Something to look into I guess. Either way gcc is building now, hopefully I’ll have a build running soon …

UPDATE: With some advice from Scott below I used the poky distro by including: DISTRO="poky" in my local.conf file. As promised bitbake then doesn’t try to check out the gcc svn repository directly from gnu.org. Instead it grabs a tarball from one ob the Yocto mirrors and the build takes mere minutes. Thanks Scott!