[yocto] Building on MacOS X

Thu Jan 12 09:41:10 PST 2017

 I have Parallels (running on El Capitan the one before Sierra)  and ubuntu 14  running my current build environment on a MacBook Pro, but boy is the build slow… I also worked at Apple for 19 years on drivers inside MacOS X/iOS, so I am more than motivated to have this working natively rather than inside any container or disk space hogging environment.  As I mentioned I am working with the Intel Aero compute board, so slogging though all this fat to build an image is a productivity killer.

I think most of the  incompatibilities between Linux and os x (which btw is coming from the ios side of the fence unfortunately), can be mitigated with boot args or via the command line . Apple’s compiler team had to make llvm compatible with gcc, so I am surprised if in 2017, there are compiler issues to building for an x86_64 platform with llvm on the Mac . That’s the kind of bug Apple likes to fix promptly.. 

As I mentioned, I tried to simply source the oe-init-build-env, and got an error that the readlink command that yocto is using is incompatible with the bsd version of readlink built into os x. 

i.e when I run .

source oe-init-build-env

I get the error

readlink: illegal option -- f

Which is because on OS X readlink doesn’t specify -f

YNOPSIS
     stat [-FLnq] [-f format | -l | -r | -s | -x] [-t timefmt] [file ...]
     readlink [-n] [file ...]

I didn’t want to go through this level of change in the Yocto sources if (1) people don’t care to take changes or (2) it had already been done before.. I was curious how far down this rabbit hole people had gone before..

Roger

> On Jan 12, 2017, at 8:50 AM, Andrea Galbusera <gizero at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 5:21 PM, Belisko Marek <marek.belisko at gmail.com <mailto:marek.belisko at gmail.com>> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2017 at 4:39 PM, Tim Orling
> <timothy.t.orling at linux.intel.com <mailto:timothy.t.orling at linux.intel.com>> wrote:
> > You can also build using Docker containers:
> > https://github.com/crops/docker-win-mac-docs/wiki <https://github.com/crops/docker-win-mac-docs/wiki>
> Well the re is other limitation about slow filesystem access from
> docker on osx. There is workaround to use nfs but it's not possible to
> use nfs for building yocto - so it's kind of chicken-egg problem ;)
> 
> I shortly tested the CROPS docker-based setup after watching some presentation at ELCE 2016 in Berlin. It basically worked but I experienced the filesystem slowness your are talking about. I ended up waiting hours to see a simple core-image-minimal build complete (even after giving more cores to docker). One more point is that slightly more complex build scenarios, i.e. building resin.os, also required tweaking docker run parameters for the build container in order to give bitbake access to features like loop devices it needed (not always easily debuggable issues indeed). Turned out I decided to stick with more canonical linux based environments for the moment.
> 
> Anyway, the technology behind CROPS is *very* interesting to me, and I'd like to hear from people closely involved (Tim?) what the state of the art is and what we can expect to see in the near future. IIRC, the roadmap for Yocto 2.3 release was supposed to resurrect the Eclipse plugin and adopt CROPS as an alternative for running eSDK in a seamless way on different development host OSs. Beside from the images on docker hub and the github projects that didn't have high activity in the latest months, I hardly find discussions and documentation on the whole approach. Isn't this hot enough anymore or are there big issues that will prevent this technology from taking off. I often manage SDKs for Windows-minded developers and I strongly yearn to find a better approach to help them feel at home while building stuff for OE/Yocto based systems... 
> 
>  
> >
> > On Jan 12, 2017, at 7:34 AM, Burton, Ross <ross.burton at intel.com <mailto:ross.burton at intel.com>> wrote:
> >
> >
> > On 12 January 2017 at 15:14, Roger Smith <roger at sentientblue.com <mailto:roger at sentientblue.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> Is there any documentation for running the Yocto build system on Mac OS X
> >> or macOS as Apple now calls it? I am working with the Intel Aero board.
> >> Before I go down the rabbit hole of fixing issues like this one (and I am
> >> using the bash shell), I’d like to know if anyone has build it on os x
> >> before.
> >
> >
> > If you install all of the GNU tools using brew or similar and put them first
> > on $PATH then you can get bitbake started.  Then you need to stub out the
> > linux-specific bits in bitbake.  I've previously started on this work
> > already
> > (http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=ross/darwin <http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/log/?h=ross/darwin>).
> > The next step is figuring out how to configure OE to build and link natively
> > on OSX using LLVM instead of GCC.
> >
> > However all of this is mostly academic because in Sierra (iirc) onwards
> > there is tighter security on processes, which means that pseudo won't work
> > even if you port it to macOS.
> >
> > So unless you fancy some non-trivial engineering the short version is just
> > use something like Docker to run a Linux system on your Mac.
> >
> > Ross
> > --
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> 
> marek
> 
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