As mentioned in the
"Checksums (Signatures)"
section of the BitBake User Manual, BitBake tries to automatically
determine what variables a task depends on so that it can rerun
the task if any values of the variables change.
This determination is usually reliable.
However, if you do things like construct variable names at runtime,
then you might have to manually declare dependencies on those
variables using vardeps
as described in the
"Variable Flags"
section of the BitBake User Manual.
If you are unsure whether a variable dependency is being picked up automatically for a given task, you can list the variable dependencies BitBake has determined by doing the following:
Build the recipe containing the task:
$ bitbake recipename
Inside the
STAMPS_DIR
directory, find the signature data
(sigdata
) file that corresponds to the
task.
The sigdata
files contain a pickled
Python database of all the metadata that went into creating
the input checksum for the task.
As an example, for the
do_fetch
task of the db
recipe, the
sigdata
file might be found in the
following location:
${BUILDDIR}/tmp/stamps/i586-poky-linux/db/6.0.30-r1.do_fetch.sigdata.7c048c18222b16ff0bcee2000ef648b1
For tasks that are accelerated through the shared state
(sstate)
cache, an additional siginfo
file is
written into
SSTATE_DIR
along with the cached task output.
The siginfo
files contain exactly the
same information as sigdata
files.
Run bitbake-dumpsig
on the
sigdata
or
siginfo
file.
Here is an example:
$ bitbake-dumpsig ${BUILDDIR}/tmp/stamps/i586-poky-linux/db/6.0.30-r1.do_fetch.sigdata.7c048c18222b16ff0bcee2000ef648b1
In the output of the above command, you will find a line like the following, which lists all the (inferred) variable dependencies for the task. This list also includes indirect dependencies from variables depending on other variables, recursively.
Task dependencies: ['PV', 'SRCREV', 'SRC_URI', 'SRC_URI[md5sum]', 'SRC_URI[sha256sum]', 'base_do_fetch']
base_do_fetch
)
also count as variable dependencies.
These functions in turn depend on the variables they
reference.
The output of bitbake-dumpsig
also includes
the value each variable had, a list of dependencies for each
variable, and
BB_HASHBASE_WHITELIST
information.
There is also a bitbake-diffsigs
command for
comparing two siginfo
or
sigdata
files.
This command can be helpful when trying to figure out what changed
between two versions of a task.
If you call bitbake-diffsigs
with just one
file, the command behaves like
bitbake-dumpsig
.
You can also use BitBake to dump out the signature construction information without executing tasks by using either of the following BitBake command-line options:
‐‐dump-signatures=SIGNATURE_HANDLER
-SSIGNATURE_HANDLER
SIGNATURE_HANDLER
are "none" and
"printdiff", which dump only the signature or compare the
dumped signature with the cached one, respectively.
Using BitBake with either of these options causes BitBake to dump
out sigdata
files in the
stamps
directory for every task it would have
executed instead of building the specified target package.