The HIPOS Platform Project

HIPOS is an Open Source, Yocto/OpenEmbedded based BSP and Linux distribution for embedded devices mainly from the DResearch Fahrzeugelektronik GmbH.

Getting Started

You need to do this only once for every new build environment you're setting up.

Prerequisites

A powerful build machine with a lot of RAM, with fast and large HDDs (SSDs preferred)

Although OpenEmbedded builds sandboxes to be reproducible and build host independent you will need some tools to kick-start OpenEmbedded's first stage. After that OE will build an extensive set of tools for compilation and cross-compilation for itself. No matter what machine you've got, from-scratch builds will tend to take several hours (so try to build incrementally).

For required packages at your build host see OE wiki.

Set up build environment from scratch

You only need to do this once for every new from-scratch build. We've said that already, but we want to be on the safe side.

Attention : OpenEmbedded makes heavy use of absolute pathnames in all automatically generated scripts. This means that *you cannot move your build environment elsewhere after it has been initialised. You would have to start from scratch then.

1. get HIPOS

git clone git://github.com/DFE/HIPOS.git

This will clone the HIPOS project into the local sub directory HIPOS/. Change into this directory by issuing

cd HIPOS

2. run the init script

Run (exactly like this!):

source ./init-open.sh .

in the repository root. All the git submodules (i.e. the other OE layers we're using plus an up-to-date bitbake) will be initialized and cloned. The script will also generate bblayers.conf and local.conf from their respective template files.

Building and Debugging

Initialize your build environment

1. Build environment is set up If you did not set up your build environment and you need to start from scratch please work through Getting started first.

2. A command shell is open in the repository root

You cloned the HIPOS repository in the first step, and you cd'd into the directory created.

3. source setup-build-open.sh

If you re-visit the HIPOS folder later, you need to execute this script in order to re-init the build environment.

The script will respond:

### Shell environment set up for builds. ###
...

Note that this script will put you in the subdirectory build-open/. This is your work / scratch directory.

You're now ready to bitbake your first HIPOS target. Do not build one of the targets mentioned in the setup script. Instead, bake a real HIPOS image like that:

bitbake hipos-devimage

Because the first build takes a really long time, it's now a good idea to inspect the created HIPOS sub-folders and recipes.

Select a machine

The target machine is determined by the value assigned to MACHINE in build/conf/local.conf. This configuration file is automatically generated from build/conf/local.conf.template and an optional file build/conf/private.conf containing private settings.

The default machine should be set in the template, temporary changes should be made in private.conf or by setting the MACHINE environment variable.

You need to execute source ./init-open.sh again to apply your changes in one of configuration files.

NOTE: Do not make any changes in build/conf/local.conf itself as they will be discarded the next time source ./init-open.sh is executed.

Supported machines are

• hikirk - Marvell Kirkwood based NAS/IP Recorder hardware known as MR4020
• himx0294 - FreeScale i.MX6 based hardware (details coming soon)

External Resources

• yocto Project Home
• yocto Project Documentation (Bitbake User Manual, Developer Manual and more)
• OpenEmbedded Home
• GNU Autoconf, Automake manuals

Mailing List

If you're interested in HIPOS development just come over and say hello on our mailing list.