Using a custom distribution

The creation of a distribution is a mix of simplicity and complexity. The process of creating the distribution file is very easy; however, the distribution configuration has a high impact in the way Poky behaves, and may cause a binary incompatibility with previously built binaries, depending on the options we use.

The distribution is where we define global options, such as the toolchain version, graphical backends, support for OpenGL, and so on. We should make a distribution only in case the default settings provided by Poky do not fulfil our requirements.

Usually, we intend to change a small set of options from Poky. For example, we remove the X11 support to use a framebuffer instead. We can easily accomplish this by reusing Poky distribution and overriding the variables we need. For example, the sample distribution represented by the file <layer>/conf/distro/mydistro.conf is as follows:

require conf/distro/poky.conf
DISTRO = "mydistro"
DISTRO_NAME = "mydistro...