ubuntu vs yocto...

[edsut]

I posted this to the "Software - General" group, but got nuttin, so I'm reposting here...

I've been playing with the Wandboard on and off for a while now.
I've built/installed a system based on Yocto and wrote some multimedia stuff in that context.
Everything worked, but it literally took over a day just to download and build everything.
Recently I installed ubuntu 14.04LTS on the same board. I was able to take the code that I
cross-compiled for the Yocto-based system and build it natively on the wandboard.
No big deal, but kinda cute, and in my case could be quite advantageous because I may
ultimately be handing this off to other developers that would not be quite as comfortable
with the whole cross-development environment.

Anyway that leads to my question (sorry if this is already posted somewhere)...
With the ubuntu14.04LTS release having hardfloat and VPU/GPU support built in,
what are the significant runtime differences between the two systems?

I will eventually be writing a audio device driver to run off the I2C and AUDMUX pins
that (luckily) come to the JP1-4 headers (viewtopic.php?f=8&t=944).
In that case I assume I have no choice but to build with the Yocto environment, true?

[ClayMontgomery]

You can build much lighter-weight systems with Yocto than is possible with Ubuntu, but still have accelerated OpenGL ES and gstreamer. For example, apps for Ubuntu require the X11 window system and gstreamer. But, with Yocto, X11 and gstreamer are completely optional. You can build apps to run full-screen only or you can use an alternative window system, like DirectFB, Sato/Matchbox or Wayland.

Regards, Clay

[edsut]

Clay,
Thanks for responding...
When you say "lighter weight" I assume you mean less disk overhead, right?
For what I'm doing right now it doesn't matter if I use a 4G or a 32G uSD card.
It may actually be to my advantage for this to look a lot like generic linux for
other users. I'm working on a proof-of-concept.
The important thing to me at this point is that I still get IPU/VPU-based optimization
with video input; so my assumption is that either build will give me that.
True?
Tx

[ClayMontgomery]

True. The difference is a lot more than disk space though, memory usage and number of services running too.

[rakulria]

The essential and graphical support packages you need for a supported Ubuntu or Debian distribution are shown in the following command: $ sudo apt-get ...

[ClayMontgomery]

Even though Yocto is derived from Debian, there is no apt-get because there is no repository of pre-compiled binaries for Yocto.
You must instead build them yourself.
You can determine which packages are available to build locally with:

bitbake -s

Regards, Clay

[magnum007]

I posted on yacto forum but no replies yet.
I am in the process of learning the ways of yacto and it seems to me that the yacto project in the wangboard.org downloads offers in not a yacto repo, right? what is it?

Then the wand wikipedia page info for yacto is super general so it does not help.

So could you give me a set of links, and some steps I can follow to build a yacto linux on the wand? Can it work for a new version of yacto like pyro or
it it stuck in the past? If stuck in the past then why?

Thanks for helping.

[ClayMontgomery]

The wiki instructions are good:

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products.
On Wandboard, Yocto makes use of the metadata layers provided by the https://github.com/Freescale/fsl-community-bsp-platform
Getting started with Yocto on Wandboard: http://wiki.wandboard.org/Getting_started_with_Yocto_on_Wandboard

Stick with versions of Yocto that people use on Wandboards and report good results. I have used Dizzy, Fido, Jethro and Krogoth. I think Morty and Pyro still have problems on ARM. They tend to work on Intel before ARM, but they get fixed eventually.

Regards, Clay