[bitbake-devel] Bitbake for native x86 project?

[Chris Morgan]

Hello.

I can't be sure that I'm asking the question correctly so please
forgive me if I've gotten something wrong here.

I'm working on a project that generates several libraries and
applications. Today we build and run exclusively on x86 Linux desktop
machines and use cmake for the build system. In the future we plan to
add cross-compiling of these same libraries and applications for an
embedded arm platform, Yocto based. We would like to maintain both
types of build, for x86 and for arm.

I've seen guides on how to use Yocto (or other bitbake based
distributions) to generate x86 images but these appear to involve
building the entire x86 toolchain, kernel, all libraries, creating a
virtual root and building a root filesystem image that one would run
under an emulator.

In my case I'd like to use bitbake to build libraries and applications
and create a virtual root, but not create a kernel, toolchain and
other system provided libraries. Then, when we decide to transition
over to Yocto I'd like to leverage the recipes by plugging them into
the Yocto system somehow (I'm still starting to understand the
process).

I haven't seen any guides or information on how to use bitbake for
native desktop applications. I feel like its certainly possible but it
appears to be quite a bit of work just to proof of concept things.

Is there anything inherently wrong with what I'm proposing here with
bitbake? Does it make sense that it would save time to develop the
recipes once and use bitbake for the desktop like this?

Chris