[yocto] Yocto 1.2 Beta Testing Report

[Andy Gikling]

Responses to Yocto 1.2 Beta Test:


Q: Which architecture did you choose to build?



A: sugarbay



Q: How easily were you able to build an image and boot an image?



A: I followed the QS step by step.  I've done it before so it was easier this time around.

I had no problem building core-image-minimal.  And it ran out of the box.  No hang-ups.



Q: Is there any surprise to you in the process of doing this Beta testing? If so, would you please describe it and tell us how you expected it to work?



A: There were no surprises for me.  However, I didn't add anything outside of the meta-intel and meta-intel-sugarbay layers.



Q: How do you like our HOB interface? Please provide us with your thoughts and suggestions on HOB interface and functionality.



A: This was by far what I was MOST impressed with.  I've used hob in 1.1 extensively and I found the new version to be very well put together.  The little "I" buttons were a cool touch.  Some of the information in the "I" buttons could easily be elaborated on though.  For example, the "I" next to the Layers interface points you at the manual.  But why not point out the fact that there are also many layers that are useful and already made out on the net?  Then link to that too maybe.

Also, for another example, in the settings dialog, the "other" tab has an info button that simply says this is where you specify more key/value pairs - but why not then list say a dozen common options that people might want to use.  Or point at a list somewhere that has some examples with descriptions and help.



I was very surprised to see that once my image built in hob the bottom right corner has a deploy button.  It then lets you specify a usb drive to write the image to.  I was excited about this because it would be an amazingly useful feature if you don't know how to format usb drives in ZIP mode to get hardware to boot.  However, after trying this feature out it seems the script simply writes the root folders to the usb drive.  (ie. /bin /lib /usr etc...) Unfortunately, this didn't boot my hardware - normally my working usb sticks have the contents of the .hddimg on it (initrd, syslinux.cfg, vmlinz etc...).  After checking again it seems you can't even select the .hddimg file from this deploy gui either.  I needed to go back and setup my thumb drive for ZIP mode again and run syslinux on it again.  I might have missed something here though - I only tried the deploy feature once.



Overall I was very pleased with the new hob.  Because you can easily save configurations I feel like I might find myself using this tool in the future exclusively.  It's just so much faster and intuitive than scrolling through configuration files.  I'm sure it has bugs but I haven't encountered any yet.



Q: Was it easy to find the support you needed to build and boot an image?



A: The documentation is really quite good.  However, if you run into any sort of errors during build - which is easy to do - the documentation isn't much help.  There's so many things that can go wrong it makes sense that there wouldn't be documentation for many types of errors.  That said, it would be nice to see a more robust "troubleshooting errors" section in the docs.



Q: Which Bugzilla reports did you submit?



A: None.  I find it hard to tell if what I'm looking at is actually a bug or if I'm simply misunderstanding or missing something.

I will in the future though.



Q: Did you try anything else with Yocto 1.2?



A: I tried added shadow, tcf-agent, openssh and gdb to my hob build it worked great - first try.  Interestingly though, when I went to boot this image the username "root" didn't work anymore.  I know it has to do with adding shadow, but why would adding that package "break" my "root" login with no password.  I've added shadow before in 1.1 and this didn't happen - root still worked as a login with no password.  Might this be a bug?  Or do I need to configure shadow before I bake?



Q: What would you like to have in Yocto Project for future releases?



A:  More options for the "deploy" feature in hob would be nice.  It would be sweet it you could just drop your build right onto your boot media directly from hob gui - be it a usb drive, sata hard drive or otherwise.



I've also noticed hob used to put some of it generated config files in the /build/conf/ folder.  It seems that they are gone now.  It would be nice to allow the hob user to go and see exactly what configuration file changes have been made by using the gui.  This functionality would be an invaluable tool to teach new users about how it all works.



Best,



~Andy Gikling

LasX Industries Inc.

agikling at lasx.com





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