The following list presents challenges you might encounter when developing using the Yocto Project:
Steep Learning Curve: The Yocto Project has a steep learning curve and has many different ways to accomplish similar tasks. It can be difficult to choose how to proceed when varying methods exist by which to accomplish a given task.
Understanding What Changes You Need to Make For Your Design Requires Some Research: Beyond the simple tutorial stage, understanding what changes need to be made for your particular design can require a significant amount of research and investigation. For information that helps you transition from trying out the Yocto Project to using it for your project, see the "What I wish I'd Known" and "Transitioning to a Custom Environment for Systems Development" documents on the Yocto Project website.
Project Workflow Could Be Confusing: The Yocto Project workflow could be confusing if you are used to traditional desktop and server software development. In a desktop development environment, mechanisms exist to easily pull and install new packages, which are typically pre-compiled binaries from servers accessible over the Internet. Using the Yocto Project, you must modify your configuration and rebuild to add additional packages.
Working in a Cross-Build Environment Can Feel Unfamiliar: When developing code to run on a target, compilation, execution, and testing done on the actual target can be faster than running a BitBake build on a development host and then deploying binaries to the target for test. While the Yocto Project does support development tools on the target, the additional step of integrating your changes back into the Yocto Project build environment would be required. Yocto Project supports an intermediate approach that involves making changes on the development system within the BitBake environment and then deploying only the updated packages to the target.
The Yocto Project
OpenEmbedded build system
produces packages in standard formats (i.e. RPM,
DEB, IPK, and TAR).
You can deploy these packages into the running system
on the target by using utilities on the target such
as rpm
or
ipk
.
Initial Build Times Can be Significant: Long initial build times are unfortunately unavoidable due to the large number of packages initially built from scratch for a fully functioning Linux system. Once that initial build is completed, however, the shared-state (sstate) cache mechanism Yocto Project uses keeps the system from rebuilding packages that have not been "touched" since the last build. The sstate mechanism significantly reduces times for successive builds.