Getting started

⚠️ The kas project files have been moved to the meta-tedge repository under the kas directory (where meta-tedge is also the thin-edge.io Yocto Layer). The kas project files were moved to ease the development of the Yocto layer and to ensure that any changes can be validated before the changes are merged.

This project shows how to build custom Yocto images which can be deployed to devices.

Whilst the project can be modified to support your own setup, currently the project only includes the configuration required to deploy to the following devices:

• Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 (64 bit variants only)

General project flow

Below describes the general workflow when using this project to build an image and to deploy the image to a device.

The project flow is as follows:

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> BuildBootImage
    BuildBootImage --> FlashBootImage
    FlashBootImage --> OnboardDevice
    OnboardDevice --> EditImage
    EditImage --> BuildImage
    BuildImage --> DeployImage
    DeployImage --> EditImage: next version

Loading

Where each step is described below:

Step	Description
BuildBootImage	Build bootstrap image
FlashBootImage	Flash the bootstrap image to the device, e.g. flash the SD card (this is only required once!)
OnboardDevice	Register the device once to the cloud so you can enable Over-the-Air (OTA) updates
EditImage	Modify your image when new future requirements come up
BuildImage	Build a new image which includes the new changes
DeployImage	Deploy the image to the device using OTA update

Using the project

Prelude

It is highly recommended to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for your build (host) machine. If you know what you are doing then you can use another linux distribution, however we cannot help you when things go wrong.

Minimum requirements

• At least 100 GB free disk space (however ~500GB is recommended as you don't want to run out and have to set all of this up again)
• x86_64 Machine (arm64/aarch64 is not supported by Yocto)
• Lots of time (first build can take > 6 hours...welcome to the world of yocto)

Installing the prerequisites

To start off, you will need to install the project and Yocto dependencies.

1. Clone the project and open a console at project's root directory

2. Install just (follow the instructions on the justfile website)

3. Install kas (a tool used to managed yocto bitbake projects)

   pip3 install kas

4. Install the yocto dependencies

   Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

   sudo apt install file gawk wget git diffstat unzip texinfo gcc build-essential chrpath socat cpio python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect xz-utils debianutils iputils-ping python3-git python3-jinja2 libegl1-mesa libsdl1.2-dev xterm python3-subunit mesa-common-dev zstd liblz4-tool

   If you having troubles please consult the Yocto Documentation

Reducing build times

You can configure a common sstate cache and download folder to share amongst different projects to speed up the build times.

Create the following folders at the desired location, and then add the paths to the local .env file located at the root folder of the project (this file is not included in the project).

file: .env

SSTATE_DIR=/data/yocto/sstate-cache
DL_DIR=/data/yocto/downloads

Building an image

Build an image which includes thin-edge.io and RAUC:

Raspberry Pi

KAS_MACHINE=raspberrypi3-64 just build-project ./projects/tedge-rauc.yaml
KAS_MACHINE=raspberrypi4-64 just build-project ./projects/tedge-rauc.yaml

Or you can save the KAS_MACHINE value in your .env file

KAS_MACHINE=raspberrypi3-64

The bootstrap image (which you can flash to an SD card) is located below:

ls -ltr "build/tmp/deploy/images/$KAS_MACHINE"/*.bz2

Where KAS_MACHINE should be replaced with the target machine value, e.g. raspberrypi4-64.

Publishing the OTA image file to Cumulocity IoT

Publish/upload the built image to Cumulocity IoT (requires go-c8y-cli to be installed and a session to be active)

set-session "your_session"
just publish

Development Tasks

Updating yocto layers

The projects use lock files in order to create reproducible builds by fixing layers to specific commits. Therefore if you need to update them, then run the following task:

just update-all-locks

Or you can specify which project file should be updated instead (if you want more control over it).

just update-lock ./projects/tedge-rauc.yaml

Tips

Unexpected build errors

If you run into unexpected build errors, or the image just doesn't include the expected contents, then try running the following task, then build again.

just clean

Or if you are still having problems, try removing all of the temp folders (build and the repositories)

just clean-all