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[FAQ] TDA4VM: How do I reduce the size of the Yocto filesystem to meet my needs

Part Number: TDA4VM

The default filesystem provided with the installer is very large and I want to customize this, what is the process of doing this?

  • There is more than one way to achieve this:

    Method #1:

    Starting with the default filesystem (tisdk-rootfs-image) that is large you can selectively remove the recipes, packagegroups of features to suit your needs. 

    Note: there is no solution that fits everyone's needs and each customers requirement could be very different, therefore it is important for you to understand

    • what you do not need in the image (tisdk-rootfs-image)
    • what you absolutely need
    • to certain certain extent, an understanding of what are the dependencies of the packages that you need or do not need will help.

    As an example, please refer to the attached patch below, this contains an illustration of the following concepts:

     /cfs-file/__key/communityserver-discussions-components-files/791/0004_2D00_Reduce_2D00_the_2D00_filesystem_2D00_aggressively_2D00_tailored_2D00_for_2D00_VISI.patch

    1. Selective removal of packagegroups (large collection of recipes/features) - in the patch refer change under meta-arago-distro/recipes-core/images/tisdk-rootfs-image.bb, it is removing all the connectivity recipes, testing related packagegroups (packagegroup-arago-test), addons (packagegroup-arago-test-addons)
    2. Selective removal of recipes - in the patch refer change under  meta-arago-distro/recipes-core/packagegroups/packagegroup-arago-base.bb, the patch is removing curl, ethtool and thermal-init
    3. Selective removal of collection of recipes - in the patch refer change under : meta-arago-distro/recipes-core/packagegroups/packagegroup-arago-console.bb, the patch is removing FSTOOLS etc.
    4. Selective removal of certain codecs belonging to a certain machine type - in the patch refer change under meta-arago-distro/recipes-core/packagegroups/packagegroup-arago-gst.bb, the patch is removing a hevc codec for dra7 machine type.
    5. Addition of components that got removed in the above operations - in the patch refer change under  meta-arago-distro/recipes-core/packagegroups/packagegroup-arago-tisdk-graphics.bb, the recipes such as strace, gdb etc are getting included to satisfy the requirement.

    So, as you can see that there are quite a few options to customize the filesystem to suit your needs. At the end, you will have to iteratively build, verify and deploy the changes to finalize.

    The above example is taken from the Vision SDK 3.08 filesystem, where the requirement was to produce a very small filesystem from the default image. 

    Method #2:


    Some customers have also found it easy to start with the most minimal filesystem "arago-tiny-image" and then modify this to add components that they require.