Migrating to Yocto: A Guide and Lessons Learned
summary
Migrating a large Cisco Meraki OpenWRT-based repo to Yocto and BitBake produces concrete results: about 50 proprietary recipes require porting, a company “Yocto pouring day” ports 35 in one session, and build time drops from four hours to 15 minutes — a 16x speed-up. Engineering builds a meraki_source wrapper to copy and track multiple local sources, adds meraki_features to toggle product-specific packages, and creates a custom linux-libc-headers recipe to align build and runtime kernels; migration reaches roughly 60–70% of products and the changes are working in production.
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chapters (35)
- 0:00Intro
- 1:09Repository Layout
- 1:38Legacy Build System
- 2:20Unmaintainable OpenWRT
- 2:57Legacy Builds are Painful
- 4:16Summary
- 4:45Follow the Quick Start Guide
- 5:07Build Your Own Image
- 6:25Porting from OpenWRT
- 7:40Refresher: Appends
- 8:22Refresher Layers
- 8:38Back to Porting Packages
- 8:56Add an Append
- 9:17Match Versions
- 9:41Apply the Same Patches
- 10:31Yocto Porting Day
- 11:01Give a Tutorial
- 11:17Use Task Management Tools
- 11:36Great Success!
- 11:58Tip: Recruit People
- 12:19Extend Yocto for Your Needs
- 12:55Building from Disk: EXTERNALSRC
- 13:57Building from Disk: SRC_URI
- 14:36We Built Merakisc
- 16:13Machine & Distro Features
- 16:46We Built Meraki Features
- 17:47Problem: Mismatched C Library Headers
- 19:14The Error
- 19:25The User-space App
- 20:15Solution: Use the Same Sources
- 22:18Layers Are Not Programmatically Selectable
- 26:04Successes: Build Times
- 26:36Successes: Most Products Using Yocto
- 27:28Successes: Easy Maintenance
- 27:54Closing Thoughts
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