Introduction

This SDK provides support for Eurotech iMX6 based CPU-3xx boards & modules and Reliagate-10-20 systems. It is aimed at software developers that have a good working knowledge of Linux.

Overview
The core of this SDK is based on the Yocto Project. The SDK can be used to create a custom Linux distribution into which Eurotech has integrated board support features.

What is Yocto?
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 regardless of the hardware architecture. It was founded in 2010 as a collaboration among many hardware manufacturers, open-source operating systems vendors, and electronics companies to bring some order to the chaos of embedded Linux development. Yocto Project is an umbrella project that includes the Poky distribution upon which this SDK is based. The terms 'Yocto' and 'Poky' are often interchanged because Poky is currently by far the most significant project covered by Yocto.

Poky is built using OpenEmbedded recipes with the BitBake tool. Generally, a recipe is simply a way of defining where to locate the source code of the desired component, defining a set of tasks on how to patch and build it and finally provide details on how and where to place it in the resultant root file system image. The size and extent of the image is determined by the user and may include a large number of components up to and including a full GUI as well as a complete GCC toolchain. This SDK extends this capability with easy to use tools and build scripts. 

The YoctoProject is a living, evolving project which is continually being updated and improved. For more information on the versions that this SDK supports please refer to the release notes.

For more information on Yocto usage and operation please refer to the documentation section.

Boot Loader
This SDK supports the U-Boot boot loader. Eurotech has patched and adapted U-boot to operate on it's supported hardware.  For more information on U-boot please refer to the U-boot website.

Linux Kernel
The kernel used in this SDK is based upon the standard Linux kernel from www.kernel.org but with patches added by the Yocto project and by Eurotech.

Standard User Space
Poky components such as applications, initialization scripts, shells, etc. are architecture-independent in that the same software is simply built for the needed target architecture. For the most part, the Eurotech SDK provides these components unchanged from Yocto/Poky. The build system compiles them for the supported architecture.

Tool Chain
The Eurotech SDK uses the GNU tool chain built using Yocto tools. The provided tool chain supports C and C++ and both cross and native compiling. The standard gdb debugger and other tools such as binutils are also supported.

Default Images
This SDK can generate  different system images that range in size. Users can adapt these images or create their own. These images are described later here. Users who are new to the SDK may wish to start by booting a system using eurotech-console-basic or eurotech-console-sato. The basic image is pre-installed on Reliagate-10-20 systems. The sato image is provided on CPU-3xx boards.