[meta-freescale] Pros/Cons of Yocto vs Ltib

Otavio Salvador otavio at ossystems.com.br
Fri Oct 18 10:49:48 PDT 2013


Hello Joshua,

Even tough some those question has been already answered in the
Wandboard mailing list, I am re-answering them for completeness...

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:41 PM, Joshua Kurland
<joshua.kurland at adtecdigital.net> wrote:
> I am moving this thread over from the Wandboard forums
> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/wandboard/kiuL_oIf6Qw
>
> I am developing a product on the Wandboard-quad for a company that I
> have been interning with.  Up till now I have been using Yocto to
> create an image for the SD card and to build a rootfs with which to
> cross-compile app-space code.  I have struggled with it here and
> there, but it hasn't been too difficult to learn how to use it so far.
>  Recently my company has asked me to move this development into Ltib.
> Currently Ltib is the only build tool they use, and they would prefer
> to keep it that way.  I had started to look at what it would take to
> move the Wandboard BSP to Ltib, and quickly became overwhelmed by the
> complexity.  This brings up three questions:

Well this is how life is. They can do it themselves, hire someone (you
or someone else - me?).

> 1.)  Why Yocto instead of Ltib?

We've spend a lot of energy doing the integration and you are free to
use or redo our work.

Well it depends on the project; I prefer Yocto and than I use it. This
is like asking me if I prefer blue or green hehe (I prefer green).

> What are the advantages?

Well there are several advantages, some as:

* well maintained (LTIB is dead)
* has a community (LTIB is FSL-only project, no community)
* has vendors behind it (we have commercial vendors providing support for it)
* allows cross-vendor x cross-platform x cross-host development
...
* you name it.

> What made Freescale shift 100% over to Yocto?

I suggest you to open a Service Request and ask them. I cannot talk by them.

> My company does not update to new
> boards very often; most of our products use rather old Power PCs.  It
> may be more practical to bring Wandboard support into Ltib rather than
> having developers learn both tools.  Essentially it boils down to "why
> would I want to use Yocto?".

Why you want to use Wandboard? You're free to use whatever you wish,
as you wish.

> 2.)  How can I make Yocto behave more like Ltib?  We keep a copy of
> Ltib with all of the company specific patches on a local server.  When
> a developer checks out a new copy of the project, all they have to do
> is run ltib once, the custom kernel and rootfs are already there.
> This process only takes a few minutes to complete, and the developer
> is up and running.  How can this be done using Yocto?  As a new Yocto
> user, one of the first steps is to run 'repo sync'.  In my experience
> when doing this from scratch, this has taken over an hour to complete.
>  Likewise, the first time I make an SD card image it takes a
> substantial amount of time.  Yesterday I wanted to test something I
> had done against a demo image.  I believe it took nearly three hours
> to complete the fsl-image-gui image (I have an i7 with 16gb of RAM).
> That is a long coffee break.  If I need to modify something in my
> recipe, it takes anywhere from 15 minutes to over an hour to rebuild.
> How can I speed up this process?

I can offer you a consultancy if you wish more details but Yocto
provides many enterprise-like cache, reuse and tracking features. You
need to get some time and learn about this; Yocto documentation is a
place to start.

> As a related question, how can I share a layer across multiple users?
> I am currently the only developer working on this project, however if
> the wandboard works out well for this particular project they may use
> it in others as well.  With Ltib checked directly into the head of our
> project, our developers need to do very little.  How can I set up
> Yocto so that the developer can pull from a repo and immediately have
> the custom layer, added to bblayers.conf and ready to bitbake?

Use a GIT to share it; it allows you have several people to reuse same
layer metadata and push changes to it accordingly.

> 3.)  If I MUST use Ltib, how would I transfer the BSP?  I have been
> told multiple times that this is not trivial, due to the number of
> patches that the gpu/vpu require.  I have already spent an afternoon
> or two figuring out how Ltib works, and I am more or less comfortable
> with adding a new platform.  That is, so long as the BSP is not overly
> complex.   How can I find out EXACTLY which patches are used on the
> Wandboard, and where is the best place to get them?  I have seen vpu
> patches all over the place in the meta-fsl-arm repo.  Some are for the
> imx6 (sabre, boundary), other are for the wandboard exclusively.  Some
> are for both.  How can I determine what is relevant to me and what is
> not?  Also, I hear that the kernel is being brought up to 3.10.9 and
> will include said gpu/vpu support.  Presumably I would want to run
> through this entire process again with the new kernel, new kernel
> patches, etc.  Video is absolutely vital to my project, and I would
> want to have the latest and greatest.

Sorry but Joshua this is complex. You're are free to redo our work
(and port all to LTIB) or use Yocto.

We (all community behind meta-freescale) are doing all the BSP
integration freely available and in a Free Software license so you can
reuse, change, distribute, sell, ...; you can reuse our work and port
it to LTIB.

The porting process of Yocto to LTIB (even being non-sense for me) is
something which I would not do for free. I think it makes much more
sense (and is in the end cheaper) if you move to Yocto.

> I hope my questions are not too trivial that they can simply be looked
> up in the manual (although I'm sure some of them are).  Maybe some of
> the answers can be added to the Freescale imx FAQ for others who may
> be in a similar situation as myself.

I think it gives a good feedback; it does has some questions which you
can answer by yourself looking at the manuals but it also allow us to
have this message in the archive to point people to, when those
question are done again in the future :-)

Regards,

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



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