What is it?

So let’s get rolling! Firstly, do give the readme of the link above a good read, I didn’t at first, as a yocto developer I just skipped ahead and ignored it to later find some issues. Let’s work through this document first and understand it. Step one is of course to download our source files, these are a multitude of yocto, NI and third party developed sources which NI is requesting specific commits for to ensure a stable build. So I’m not sure why we don’t get that but anyway, we fix those later :). This is a pretty good practice and I recommend you implement similar if you start maintaining your own builds.

The next bit is the sourcing of a ni named file, but for a yocto developer this looks pretty familiar. oe-init-build-env is a typical file for yocto and what you use to source and first setup your build environment once you have your recipes and bitbake ready and downloaded/created. The NI version calls this file, but after telling it by setting up some common yocto variables with the actual directory path. This is because NI has organised the file structure a bit more than the typical build setup (i.e. your build directory is not alongside all your source files, there’s a script directory as well for other things).

You then need to setup your build to know a bit more about your target. Most new systems are x64 so you can assume pretty well that you want this machine, even if it’s an Intel processor! If it’s a Zynq chip like the NI SOM, that’s when you need to use the other machine option. This means that once we’ve sourced we should also:

export MACHINE=x64

You’ll probably also notice now that your shell says (bb) at the front and you’ve been moved into the build directory:

If you don’t know already, you should learn what bitbake is by googling and learning yocto, I prefer by doing but do be investigative like me if you take this approach. If you don’t like that approach of learning, I recommend watching online video’s (although I tried and felt they over complicated matters very heavily and never really got down to it) or attend a course. For now, I’ll guide us to a successful build (hopefully).