Yocto’s reference distribution poky comes with SysVinit as an initalization manager. However many major linux distributions use systemd as a system and service manager. In this post we will look how to easily switch your yocto distro to systemd.
Systemd has been a quite controvorsial replacement for SysVinit and I am not going to discuss the pros and cons of them here. This has already been done enough. However I am used to systemd from working on Debian, Ubuntu and ArchLinux. Therefore I also wanted my distribution to use systemd. It turns out that this is actually quite easy. (Only be aware that systemd will be bigger in size than SysVinit, although it can be customized for embedded projects).
In your distribution config file conf/distro/<distroname>.conf add the following
lines. E.g. my meta-foundation/conf/distro/foundation.conf:
DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " systemd"
DISTRO_FEATURES_BACKFILL_CONSIDERED = "sysvinit"
VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager = "systemd"
VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_initscripts = ""
And that’s it. We are done. (Note: the space in DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " systemd"
is required!)
With DISTRO_FEATURES_append = " systemd" and VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_init_manager = "systemd"
we added systemd and told bitbake to use it as the initialization manager.
With DISTRO_FEATURES_BACKFILL_CONSIDERED = "sysvinit" and VIRTUAL-RUNTIME_initscripts = ""
we completly removed all SysVinit dependencies in our image. If you do not specify
these you can still can use SysVinit for your rescue/minimal image.
DISTRO_FEATURES_BACKFILL_CONSIDERED lists features which should not be used for
feature backfilling.