Poky is the the build tool in Yocto Project. It is at the heart of Yocto Project. You use Poky within Yocto Project to build the images (kernel software) for targeted hardware. Before jumping into Poky you should have an understanding of Yokto Project. Be sure you are familiar with the information in the Yocto Project Quick Start. You can find this documentation on the public Yocto Project Website.

Poky provides an open source Linux, X11, Matchbox, GTK+, Pimlico, Clutter, and other GNOME Mobile technologies based full platform build tool within Yocto Project. It creates a focused, stable, subset of OpenEmbedded that can be easily and reliably built and developed upon. Poky fully supports a wide range of x86 ARM, MIPS and PowerPC hardware and device virtulisation. Poky is primarily a platform builder which 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. Images for many kinds of devices can be generated, however 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 development of 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 at very high DPI and restricted size, such as those often found on smartphones and PDAs. It is coded with focus on efficiency and speed so that it works smoothly on hand-held and other embedded hardware. It will sit neatly on top of any device using the GNOME Mobile stack, providing 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 organisations including Intel Corporation.

The Poky User Guide is split into sections covering different aspects of Poky. The 'Using Poky' section gives an overview of the components that make up Poky followed by information about using Poky and debugging images created in Yocto Project. The 'Extending Poky' section gives information about how to extend and customise Poky along with advice on how to manage these changes. The 'Platform Development with Poky' section gives 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 giving details on a specific section of Poky functionality. This manual applies to Poky Release 3.3 (Green).

We recommend Debian-based distributions, in particular a recent Ubuntu release (10.04 or newer), as the host system for Poky. Nothing in Poky is distribution specific and other distributions will most likely work as long as the appropriate prerequisites are installed - 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 public Yocto Project Website.

Periodically, we make releases of Poky and these are available at . These are more stable and 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 where the numbers increase for each subsequent build and can be used to reference it. Automated builds are available for "standard" Poky and for Poky SDKs and toolchains as well as any testing versions we might have such as poky-bleeding. The toolchains can be used either as external standalone toolchains or can be combined with Poky as a prebuilt 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.pokylinux.org/poky.git; a web interface to the repository can be accessed at . The 'master' is where the deveopment work takes place and you should use this if you're after to work with the latest cutting edge developments. It is possible trunk can suffer temporary periods of instability while new features are developed and if this is undesireable we recommend using one of the release branches.