Build Machine Requirements

Build machine requirements vary depending on what you are building. You may get by with 8GB of RAM for simple images, but building anything with Chromium in it will likely require 64GB of RAM. We recommend at least 16GB and preferably 32 or 64GB.

Yocto aggressively parallelizes the build, so it will max out your CPUs. Generally, you need to have 2GB of RAM for each virtual core. To determine the number of cores, run cat /proc/cpuinfo and locate the siblings field. For x86 CPUs, this is typically twice the number of CPU cores due to hyperthreading.

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : AuthenticAMD
cpu family      : 23
model           : 113
model name      : AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
stepping        : 0
microcode       : 0x8701021
cpu MHz         : 2200.000
cache size      : 512 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 24
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 12

For the above 12-core machine, we have 24 virtual cores, so need ~48GB of RAM.

If you are running out of memory during builds, you can add the following to local.conf:

PARALLEL_MAKE = "-j 11"
BB_NUMBER_THREADS = "11"
XZ_THREADS = "8"
# Max 10% of memory to be used during parallel xz
XZ_MEMLIMIT = "10%"

A single build can take 50GB of disk space or more. SSD drives speed up builds quite a bit over rotating disks.