Chapter 7. BitBake

Table of Contents

7.1. Parsing
7.2. Preferences and Providers
7.3. Dependencies
7.4. The Task List
7.5. Running a Task
7.6. BitBake Command Line
7.7. Fetchers

BitBake is a program written in Python that interprets the Metadata used by the OpenEmbedded build system. At some point, developers wonder what actually happens when you enter:

     $ bitbake core-image-sato
        

This chapter provides an overview of what happens behind the scenes from BitBake's perspective.

Note

BitBake strives to be a generic "task" executor that is capable of handling complex dependency relationships. As such, it has no real knowledge of what the tasks being executed actually do. BitBake just considers a list of tasks with dependencies and handles Metadata consisting of variables in a certain format that get passed to the tasks.