For embedded systems, there is a debug portion that should be executed on real hardware because the application uses hardware-specific peripherals, and it may be difficult to emulate. In addition, some of the debug processes are dependent on source signals such as electric or optical, or the resultant action will be a mechanical behavior that may be difficult to test effectively on emulators.

The first proposed scenario for the development in target is to create a development image to be used along with an external toolchain. A development image is filled with header files and additional library links. This will be an image prepared to provide a build environment for a custom application, and it may be used with a custom toolchain or the Yocto Project external toolchain. The following line adds these properties to an image:

IMAGE_FEATURES += "dev-pkgs"

In case we want to modify only build/conf/local.conf, the variable to be used is EXTRA_IMAGE_FEATURES...