A blog by Devendra Tewari
The last time I posted about building a Linux system for a Raspberry Pi using the Yocto project, I used a Linux Virtual machine on macOS. Docker has since become quite popular and is often used to build embedded Linux systems. In this post, I document how to create a Docker container to run the build in the aforementioned post, on macOS, but Linux and Windows should work similarly.
To create the container, we’ll start with the ubuntu:20.04 base image available at Docker Hub
docker run --name yocto-raspberry-pi -it -v ${PWD}:/workdir ubuntu:20.04 /bin/bash
We’ve mapped /workdir in the container to the current directory to share files between host and container. You can also use the docker cp command to copy files/folders between host and container. You cannot build in that directory because Yocto requires a case-sensitive file system.
Now that we’ve created the container and are situated in its terminal, we can install dependencies needed to run Yocto
apt update
apt install gawk wget git-core diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib build-essential chrpath socat cpio python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping python3-git python3-jinja2 libegl1-mesa libsdl1.2-dev pylint3 xterm python3-subunit mesa-common-dev libpseudo locales vim
We’ve also installed vim to be able to edit any files within the container.
Yocto build system requires the system locale to be set to en_US.UTF-8
locale-gen "en_US.UTF-8"
Finally, we need to run the build as a different user because Yocto does not allow building as root
adduser pi
su pi
cd /home/pi
Now, you should be good to follow the post referenced earlier to build a Linux system for the Raspberry Pi.
To return to the container any time in the future, run
docker start -ai yocto-raspberry-pi
su pi
cd /home/pi