The BitBake task scheduler started as a fork from Portage, which is the package management system used in the Gentoo distribution. However, nowadays the two projects have diverged a lot due to the different usage focusses. The Yocto Project and the OpenEmbedded Project are the most known and intensive users of BitBake, which remains a separated and independent project with its own development cycle and mailing list (<[email protected]>).

As presented in Chapter 1, Meeting the Yocto Project, BitBake is a task scheduler that parses Python and the shell script mixed code. The code parsed generates and runs tasks that may have a complex dependency chain, which is scheduled to allow a parallel execution and maximize the use of computational resources. BitBake can be understood as a tool similar to GNU Make in some aspects.

In this chapter, we cover the main aspects of BitBake tool. However, for more in-depth details about the tool, please...