Build a QEMU image
HERE OTA Connect lets you easily manage OTA updates to embedded devices running custom-built Yocto images. This is a guide for building a simple Yocto image that you can run in QEMU. This is a good way to get started if you don’t know yet what hardware your project will use, or if you just want to try out the features of HERE OTA Connect without worrying about physical devices.
Prerequisites
You’ll need a build machine with the following:
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A x86-64 Linux distro supported by the Yocto project with the required packages installed.
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On a Debian-based system, you should be able to install all the required packages with the following command:
sudo apt install gawk wget git diffstat unzip texinfo gcc-multilib build-essential chrpath socat cpio python python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect python-dev xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping cpu-checker default-jre parted
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Many/most distros that aren’t on the officially supported list will still work just fine—feel free to give it a try with whatever you’re running.
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100GB+ of free disk space
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6GB+ of RAM
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QEMU—we recommend installing it from your distro’s package manager, e.g.
sudo apt install qemu
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Download the latest version directly from Google, or
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install it from your distro’s packages if available (
sudo apt install repo
)
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It’s possible use a virtual machine running Linux as your build machine. However, we don’t recommend it. It will be slower, and you’re more likely to run into difficult-to-troubleshoot issues. If you do want to use a VM despite this warning, though, make sure the VM has enough resources allocated to it. Along with the disk space and memory requirements above, we suggest allocating at least 4-6 CPU cores to the VM to speed up building. |
Also, make sure that you’ve generated your provisioning credentials first.
Create your Yocto build environment
First, clone a manifest file for the quickstart project:
mkdir myproject cd myproject repo init -u https://github.com/advancedtelematic/updater-repo.git -m {yocto-branch}.xml repo sync
This downloads the basic Yocto layers you need.
Now you can run the following script to get the environment set up:
source meta-updater/scripts/envsetup.sh qemux86-64
Customize your build
The environment setup script will have created a build directory and placed you in it. It also generates a configuration file, located at conf/local.conf
. This file is where we’ll make our modifications to the base config.
To connect with your HERE OTA Connect account, you’ll need the provisioning credentials bundle you downloaded earlier. Add the following line to your local.conf to supply those credentials to the build:
SOTA_PACKED_CREDENTIALS = "/path/to/your/credentials.zip"
Optional configuration keys
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Set image name
When you build a filesystem image, it gets automatically uploaded to OTA Connect. By default, the image will be named qemux86-64-ota
, and you’ll see the various versions of the image under that name. You can also choose to set your own name as follows:
OSTREE_BRANCHNAME = "my-super-great-project"
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Persistent Yocto shared state cache and download directory
Yocto caches its build artefacts to speed up future builds. By default, these are stored under the build directory of the current project. However, if you’re planning to build several different projects that have some shared base files, you might want them to share their cache directories, both to save space and speed up your builds. You can do that as follows:
SSTATE_DIR = "/path/to/your/shared-sstate" DL_DIR = "/path/to/your/shared-download"
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Add extra packages
There are quite a lot of packages available to install that aren’t installed by default. You can add extra packages to your image with IMAGE_INSTALL_append; for example, this will install vim:
IMAGE_INSTALL_append = " vim " (1)
1 | Note the spaces before and after the package name. This option dumbly appends a string to an install list, so we wrap it in spaces to make sure we don’t alter the list in unexpected ways. |
You can get a list of all the available packages in the layers you have configured with bitbake-layers show-recipes
Bitbake
Now you’re ready to build an image.
bitbake core-image-minimal
This step will take a while. If you used the build mirror, it might be as little as 10-15 minutes. Building everything from scratch, it will likely take a few hours.
Run the built image with QEMU
The build process creates disk images as an artefact. You can then directly run them with QEMU. (If you don’t already have it installed, install it with apt install qemu
or similar.) The meta-updater layer contains a helper script to launch the images:
../meta-updater/scripts/run-qemu-ota [image name] [mac address]
Both arguments are optional; image name defaults to core-image-minimal
, and if a mac address isn’t specified, a random one is generated.
You should see your new device appear in OTA Connect shortly after it boots. It will generate a random name for itself during autoprovisioning; you can change the name later.
Once you’ve built your first image, try adding some new software and push your update to the OTA Connect server. |