meta-vmware provides an Open Embedded board-support layer to generate VMware guest images. It is built on top of CAROS and depends on linux-caros from meta-caros, however, it can easily be modified to work with linux-yocto.

This README file contains information on building with the meta-vmware BSP layer. Please see the corresponding sections below for details.

Please submit any patches against this BSP to Travelping ([email protected])

I. Building the meta-vmware BSP layer II. OVF Profiling III. Changing Netowrk Interface Types

In order to build an image with BSP support for a given release, you need to clone the poky repository.

Having done that, and assuming you placed the folder at the top-level of your yocto build tree, you can build a vmware image by adding the location of the meta-vmware layer to bblayers.conf, along with any other layers needed (to access common metadata shared between BSPs) e.g.:

  yocto/meta-xxxx \
  yocto/meta-xxxx/meta-vmware \

To enable the vmware layer, add the vmware MACHINE to local.conf:

MACHINE ?= "vmware"

You should then be able to build a vmware image as such:

  $ source oe-init-build-env
  $ bitbake core-image-minimal

At the end of a successful build, you should have an virtual machine disk(vmdk) you can boot that as hard disk from an virtual maschine.

This release adds OVF profiling support to build vAPPs.

To add OVF support to a new image add the following line to your image recipe:

  require recipes-vmware/ovf/vmware-ovf.inc

The OVF task checks if the target MACHINE type is "vmware", so no unneeded functionality is added, if the image is built for a different target.

Use the following parameters for customization in local.conf

  * CORE_NUMBER       - # of Core(s) per VM         [default: 2]
  * RAM_SIZE          - VM's RAM in MB              [default: 8192]
  * DISK_SIZE_DATA    - Data partition's size in GB [default: 120]
  * IMAGE_ROOTFS_SIZE - Root partition's size in KB [default: 8286208 (8096 MB)]¹

¹ If you overwrite IMAGE_ROOTFS_SIZE in your local.conf, it is recommended to use values of full GBs minus 100 MB. The build system will add 100 MB (for the boot partition) to IMAGE_ROOTFS_SIZE and use the result as the actual disk size requested from vmware.

Network interface type is set to e1000 by default. The udev rules are set for e1000 and vmxnet3 interfaces. No other interface types are supported. Use the same interface type for all interfaces, mixing interface types is not supported.