thomas-roos / meta-aws-demos

Demonstrations for the meta-aws project

meta-aws is a Yocto Project Bitbake Metadata Layer. It accelerates building Amazon Web Services (AWS) software you can install to Embedded Linux. Customers use this to build IoT solutions on AWS.

In this repository, you will find meta-aws demonstrations. These demonstrations are both Poky (Yocto Project reference implementation) based and real hardware based. Many times, the hardware will be representative of real use of hardware listed in the AWS Device Catalog.

The number of demonstrations will increase over time and your contribution is very welcome!

Demonstration environments

Devices

Select your desired target environment. For more information how this repository is structured see the next section.

These are listed in alphabetical order for ease of selection and should in no way infer preference.

• agl-nxp-goldbox / AGL + NXP Goldbox
• agl-renesas / AGL + Renesas
• agl-rpi / AGL + Raspberry Pi Foundation
• dart-mx8m / variscite
• ec2-arm64 / AWS EC2
• ec2-x86-64 / AWS EC2
• imx8m / NXP
• qemu / qemux86-64
• rpi4-32 / Raspberry Pi Foundation
• rpi4-64 / Raspberry Pi Foundation
• rpi4-64-fleetprovisoning / Greengrass Nucelus Fleetprovisoning Demo
• phytec /phytec
• ti-am572x-idk / Texas Instruments
• xilinx-zcu104-zynqmp / Xilinx

Images

Generally you can build all images for all "Devices", but some combinations do not work or do not make sense!

• aws-biga-image

Quick Start

To try out this project in QEMU, run the following commands:

git submodule update --init --recursive
. init-build-env
export BUILD_DEVICE=qemu
bitbake core-image-minimal
runqemu slirp nographic

Please consider also this build host requirements.

Building

This repository uses submodules and a simple wrapper script to set the default TEMPLATECONF that allows users to select the device they want to build. The first step is to clone down the submodules:

git submodule update --init --recursive

NOTE: When dealing with submodules, it is highly recommended to enable diffing of submodule history with:

git config diff.submodule log

Next, initialize the build environment, optionally specifying the build directory:

. init-build-env [BUILDDIR]

Finally, the images can be built - details in linked readme for each BUILD_DEVICE:

bitbake core-image-minimal

To build for a different device, set the BUILD_DEVICE (see here) environment variable, like so:

export BUILD_DEVICE=ec2-arm64
bitbake core-image-minimal

For a list of all possible devices, see meta-aws-demos/conf/devices

The init-build-env script adds a helper function called get_devices which will list all devices that can be configured. This can be used to build all devices with:

for d in $(get_devices); do BUILD_DEVICE=$d bitbake core-image-minimal; done

Adding new platforms

New platforms can be added by adding a new directory under meta-aws-demos/conf/devices. This directory should contain 2 files:

layers.conf: This is the file that will be required in bblayers.conf when the product is selected

config.conf: This is the file that will be required in local.conf when the product is selected

Why choose build configurations this way?

TEMPLATECONF is a great mechanism for initially populating build configuration, but it has a few short comings that arise because it will only write the files if they don't already exist. Because of this, it's not suitable to share device configuration because users won't automatically get the new configuration for a build when they change revisions in the repository. The solution to this problem is quite simple though: Instead of including the build configuration directly in the template files, the template files instead require a file that is checked into source control. By doing this, users will automatically get the correct build configuration when changing revisions, but can still override anything they want in their local.conf