Yocto recipes inherit base.bbclass and hence their default behavior is to look for a Makefile, makefile, or GNU Makefile and use GNU make to build the package.

If your package already contains a Makefile, then all you need to worry about are the arguments that need to be passed to make. Make arguments can be passed using the EXTRA_OEMAKE variable, and a do_install override that calls the oe_runmake install needs to be provided, otherwise an empty install is run.

For example, the logrotate recipe is based on a Makefile and looks as follows:

SUMMARY = "Rotates, compresses, removes and mails system log files"
SECTION = "console/utils"
HOMEPAGE = "https://fedorahosted.org/logrotate/"
LICENSE = "GPLv2"

DEPENDS="coreutils popt"

LIC_FILES_CHKSUM...