Sometimes, you need to add pre-compiled binaries to an
image.
For example, suppose that binaries for proprietary code
exist, which are created by a particular division of a
company.
Your part of the company needs to use those binaries as
part of an image that you are building using the
OpenEmbedded build system.
Since you only have the binaries and not the source code,
you cannot use a typical recipe that expects to fetch the
source specified in
SRC_URI
and then compile it.
One method is to package the binaries and then install them as part of the image. Generally, it is not a good idea to package binaries since, among other things, it can hinder the ability to reproduce builds and could lead to compatibility problems with ABI in the future. However, sometimes you have no choice.
The easiest solution is to create a recipe that uses
the
bin_package
class and to be sure that you are using default locations
for build artifacts.
In most cases, the bin_package
class
handles "skipping" the configure and compile steps as well
as sets things up to grab packages from the appropriate
area.
In particular, this class sets noexec
on both the
do_configure
and
do_compile
tasks, sets
FILES_${PN}
to "/" so that it picks
up all files, and sets up a
do_install
task, which effectively copies all files from
${S}
to ${D}
.
The bin_package
class works well when
the files extracted into ${S}
are
already laid out in the way they should be laid out
on the target.
For more information on these variables, see the
FILES
,
PN
,
S
,
and
D
variables in the Yocto Project Reference Manual's variable
glossary.
If you can't use the bin_package
class, you need to be sure you are doing the following:
Create a recipe where the
do_configure
and
do_compile
tasks do nothing:
do_configure[noexec] = "1" do_compile[noexec] = "1"
Alternatively, you can make these tasks an empty function.
Make sure your
do_install
task installs the
binaries appropriately.
Ensure that you set up
FILES
(usually
FILES_${PN}
) to point to the
files you have installed, which of course depends
on where you have installed them and whether
those files are in different locations than the
defaults.