A bit about OpenEmbedded

My project's primary goal is making life easier for developers who want to develop for the DSP, and thus I need to familiarize myself as much as possible with how development cycle for OMAP3 systems (specifically for the BeagleBoard) is like in order to be able to understand the pain and suffering the developers undergo. And this, in turn, involves setting up OpenEmbedded, the toolchain/build framework which is the way to build the Ångström distribution from its source.

One might ask, why is a seperate build framework necessary in the first place? Isn't makefiles sufficient to carry out pretty much any build task? While I'm not exactly in the position to make expert comments on the subject, I can point out several things that would render such a seperate framework necessary:

• it makes cross-compilation (=compiling something on your machine that's going to run on some other processor/type of machine) easier since you don't have to manually obtain and set-up a compiler suite for the target machine
• building a whole Linux distribution from scratch can involve a lot of complicated internal dependencies between the things you're going to build, and this probably will mean things like a lot of downloading, untar'ing, strict order of building packages, making a lot of "make config"s and running recursive makefiles, and so on
• as a mixture of the two above, when you want to build a specific new package for your embedded device, the build framework also helps since it keeps track of changes and dependencies for these. 

So here's what OpenEmbedded (and bitbake, which is quite central to OE's workings) does for you: once you set it up properly, you just tell it "all right, I want the latest Ångström console image built for the BeagleBoard" and it downloads, configures and builds everything for you by itself! Isn't that great?

Well, of course, it's far from perfect - there might be some difficulties involved with setting it up properly, dealing with the errors that may occur during the build process, and running things for the first time tends to take very long, so be prepared to face a lot of frustration and have a lot of time in your hands (possibly even a second computer to do other things in parallel :)).

In my next post, I'll be describing my experiences about setting up OpenEmbedded in Ubuntu 10.04, solving the errors that may come up and similar. As of the time of writing, I was still trying to build the Ångström console image successfully and failing miserably, but I can at least see some light at the end of the tunnel :)