Build a yocto rootfs inside nix

Help
2

I’m interested in this as well. My method was different in that I didn’t try to build it directly, but use a FHS in conjunction with nix-shell and then build it inside the shell (which allows network access). So far, I got to this:

{ pkgs ? import <nixpkgs> {} }:

with pkgs;
let
  fhsEnv = buildFHSUserEnv {
    name = "yocto-env";

    # Packages Yocto is expecting on the host system by default
    targetPkgs = pkgs: (with pkgs; [
      gcc_multi
      which gnumake (python3.withPackages (p: [ p.pip p.pexpect ])) python2
      gawk wget gitFull diffstat diffutils unzip texinfo bzip2 gzip perl patch
      chrpath file bash cpio utillinux nettools iproute procps openssh socat xz
      debianutils iputils SDL.dev xterm binutils
    ]);

    # Headers are required to build
    extraOutputsToInstall = [ "dev" ];

    # Force install locale from "glibcLocales" since there are collisions
    extraBuildCommands = ''
      ln -sf ${glibcLocales}/lib/locale/locale-archive $out/usr/lib/locale
    '';

    # For some reason, nix-shell stalls when adding things to profile
    #profile = ''
    #  export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
    #  export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
    #  # Yocto is using the $LOCALEARCHIVE variable
    #  # instead of NixOS's $LOCALE_ARCHIVE
    #  export LOCALEARCHIVE=/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive
    #'';

    multiPkgs = pkgs: (with pkgs; []);
  };

in

(fhsEnv.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: { hardeningDisable = [ "all" ]; })).env

Unfortunately, there are still some problems with this:

  • A lot of warnings says that “can’t set locale” despite the fact that the locale can be set in the FHS
  • Some programs don’t compile (maybe because of said warnings), in my case it was m4
  • I’m not sure my method of disabling hardening is the right one :-/

For now, I’m using Yocto inside a Debian LXC container, which feels quite sad

I’m sorry I can’t help with the networking issue within the sandbox, but you might run into these issues as well, so I thought it was worth mentioning. I also would be very interested in your current config!