Kernel and Device Tree

The LmP goal is to be as close as possible to the mainline kernel when possible, or to use the community kernel support, depending on the board vendor. Supported kernel trees can be found here.

Unlike U-Boot, not all patches need to be appended to the kernel recipe. The user needs to append patches only to include features or drivers that are not upstreamed to the mainline kernel. The device tree files can be deployed to the lmp-device-tree directory in meta-subscriber-overrides so the build generates the output .dtb file.

recipes-bsp/device-tree/
├── lmp-device-tree
│   └── <board>.dts
└── lmp-device-tree.bbappend

The strategy of using the dts file separate from the Linux Kernel source helps to avoid forking the kernel when including any new dtb, so LmP relies on lmp-device-tree which is based on the Yocto Project device-tree class.

For the kernel configuration, LmP makes use of the kernel fragments, using the Yocto Project mechanism also present on linux-yocto. This is different from the also common “in-tree” configuration, which uses the file defconfig to configure the kernel.

Creating the Kernel fragments

The kernel configuration files are part of the lmp-kernel-cache repository which have a helpful README file, and is also described in the Linux microPlatform Kernel Configuration Fragments.

In short, there are several well known kernel features defined in fragment files (such as the bluetooth feature) alongside other configurations. The bsp directory is where fragments related to the BSP are stored.

The goal is to create a .bbappend to include the fragments which define the target machine. The set of files should look like the following:

├── linux-<name>
│   ├── patch-file.patch
│   ├── another-patch-file.patch
│   └── kernel-meta
│       └── bsp
│           └── <sub-group>
│               ├── <machine>.cfg
│               ├── <machine>.scc
│               └── <machine>-standard.scc
└── linux-<name>_%.bbappend

Where <name> is the kernel name for the particular kernel recipe being used. The patch files are potential patches applied by the .bbappend file on top of the kernel source code and <machine> is the machine name. The <sub-group> is a BSP subgroup, following the lmp-kernel-cache directory organization. For example, imx or raspberrypi, depending on the target machine.

It is common that the BSP fragment is defined in a <machine>-standard.scc file, with features and configurations being organized between the other files.

The linux-<name>_%.bbappend looks like:

FILESEXTRAPATHS:prepend := "${THISDIR}/${PN}:"
SRC_URI += " \
   file://kernel-meta/bsp/<sub-group>/<machine>.cfg \
   file://kernel-meta/bsp/<sub-group>/<machine>.scc \
   file://kernel-meta/bsp/<sub-group>/<machine>-standard.scc \
“

Start from the BSP kernel fragment from a close reference board, copy over those files relevant to the reference board, change the file name, and review the content configurations while reviewing the schematics or a list of needed configurations.