Overview on Yocto Build System

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products. It is an open source project initiated by the Linux Foundation in 2010. The Yocto Project uses the OpenEmbedded build system to construct complete Linux images.

The core components of the Yocto Project are:

• BitBake, the build engine is a task scheduler, like make. It interprets configuration files and recipes (also called metadata) to perform a set of tasks, to download, configure and build specified packages and filesystem images.
• OpenEmbedded-Core, a set of base layers. It is a set of recipes, layers and classes which are shared between all OpenEmbedded based systems. Recipes have a specific syntax and describe how to fetch, configure, compile and package applications and images. Layers are sets of recipes, matching a common purpose. Multiple layers are used within a same distribution, depending on the requirements.