5.1. Understanding and Creating Layers

The OpenEmbedded build system supports organizing Metadata into multiple layers. Layers allow you to isolate different types of customizations from each other. You might find it tempting to keep everything in one layer when working on a single project. However, the more modular you organize your Metadata, the easier it is to cope with future changes.

To illustrate how layers are used to keep things modular, consider machine customizations. These types of customizations typically reside in a special layer, rather than a general layer, called a Board Specific Package (BSP) Layer. Furthermore, the machine customizations should be isolated from recipes and Metadata that support a new GUI environment, for example. This situation gives you a couple of layers: one for the machine configurations, and one for the GUI environment. It is important to understand, however, that the BSP layer can still make machine-specific additions to recipes within the GUI environment layer without polluting the GUI layer itself with those machine-specific changes. You can accomplish this through a recipe that is a BitBake append (.bbappend) file, which is described later in this section.