Extend Image with Additional Functionality

There are several ways to enable and add more functionality to an image than what’s included by the image recipe. The functionality is enabled by modifying the build_dir/conf/local.conf file.

Additional Packages

The Yocto project includes a lot of recipes for different packages and utilities. Some of them are included in the recipe for the image you are building, but more can be installed into the root file system by adding them to the IMAGE_INSTALL:append variable in local.conf.

Get a list of available packages in your Yocto setup by running bitbake as below.

bitbake -s > all_recipes.txt

In the example below e2fsprogs (file system utilities) and parted (manipulates partition tables) has been added to the variable. Please note that IMAGE_INSTALL:append must start with a space character as in the example below.

IMAGE_INSTALL:append = " e2fsprogs parted"