Poky is the build tool in the Yocto Project. The Yocto Project uses Poky to build images (kernel, system, and application software) for targeted hardware. Before diving into Poky, it helps to have an understanding of the Yocto Project. Especially useful for newcomers is the information in the Yocto Project Quick Start, which you can find on the Yocto Project website. Specifically, the guide is at .

Within the Yocto Project, Poky provides an open source, full-platform build tool based on Linux, X11, Matchbox, GTK+, Pimlico, Clutter, and other GNOME Mobile technologies. It provides a focused and stable subset of OpenEmbedded upon which you can easily and reliably build and develop. Poky fully supports a wide range of x86, ARM, MIPS and PowerPC hardware and device virtualization. Poky is primarily a platform builder that generates filesystem images based on open source software such as the Kdrive X server, the Matchbox window manager, the GTK+ toolkit and the D-Bus message bus system. While images for many kinds of devices can be generated, the standard example machines target QEMU full-system emulation (x86, ARM, MIPS and PowerPC) and real reference boards for each of these architectures. Poky's ability to boot inside a QEMU emulator makes it particularly suitable as a test platform for developing embedded software. An important component integrated within Poky is Sato, a GNOME Mobile-based user interface environment. It is designed to work well with screens that use very high DPI and have restricted sizes, such as those often found on smartphones and PDAs. Because Sato is coded for speed and efficiency, it works smoothly on hand-held and other embedded hardware. It sits nicely on top of any device that uses the GNOME Mobile stack and it results in a well-defined user experience. The Sato Desktop - A screenshot from a machine running a Poky built image Poky has a growing open source community and is also backed up by commercial organizations including Intel® Corporation.

The sections in this reference manual describe different aspects of Poky. The 'Using Poky' section provides an overview of the components that make up Poky followed by information about using Poky and debugging images created in the Yocto Project. The 'Extending Poky' and 'Board Support Packages' sections provide information about how to extend and customize Poky along with advice on how to manage these changes. The 'Platform Development with Poky' section provides information about interaction between Poky and target hardware for common platform development tasks such as software development, debugging and profiling. The rest of the manual consists of several reference sections, each providing details on a specific area of Poky functionality. This manual applies to Poky Release 5.0 (Bernard).

Although we recommend Debian-based distributions (Ubuntu 10.04 or newer) as the host system for Poky, nothing in Poky is distribution-specific. Consequently, other distributions should work as long as the appropriate prerequisites are installed. For example, we know of Poky being used successfully on Redhat, SUSE, Gentoo and Slackware host systems. For information on what you need to develop images using Yocto Project and Poky, you should see the Yocto Project Quick Start on the Yocto Project website. The direct link to the quick start is .

Periodically, we make releases of Poky available at . These releases are more stable and more rigorously tested than the nightly development images.

We make nightly builds of Poky for testing purposes and to make the latest developments available. The output from these builds is available at . The numbers used in the builds increase for each subsequent build and can be used to reference a specific build. Automated builds are available for "standard" Poky and for Poky SDKs and toolchains. Additionally, testing versions such as poky-bleeding can be made available as 'experimental' builds. The toolchains can be used either as external standalone toolchains or can be combined with Poky as a pre-built toolchain to reduce build time. Using the external toolchains is simply a case of untarring the tarball into the root of your system (it only creates files in /opt/poky) and then enabling the option in local.conf.

Poky is available from our git repository located at git://git.yoctoproject.org/poky.git; a web interface to the repository can be accessed at . The 'master' is where the development work takes place and you should use this if you're interested in working with the latest cutting-edge developments. It is possible for the trunk to suffer temporary periods of instability while new features are developed. If these periods of instability are undesirable, we recommend using one of the release branches.