Introducing the v2.8 Release of the Yocto Project Extension for VS Code

Please check out the full release notes to see all the changes made in this release.

Project scan per buildConfiguration

Did you know that you can already configure the VS Code Yocto extension to handle multiple bitbake environments at once? If you haven’t, make sure to check out our configuration guide.

This feature allows you to hot-swap between environments to run bitbake tasks and scan your recipes or your project. A status bar and selector are present in the bottom right corner of the screen to that end. The typical use case is to navigate between multiple machines or distros that you might be using from the same set of layers. It even works with kas and other commandWrappers.

One of our enthusiastic users of this feature wanted to expand on those capabilities which they asked for through a GitHub issue. (By the way, we also encourage YOU to give us feedback as well through GitHub, or the VS Code marketplace). While the Christmas elves were working for Santa, we granted that user’s wish and implemented dynamic project scans aligned with the selected buildConfiguration.

With this release, whenever you pick a different buildConfiguration, the Recipes and Devtool panels are automatically refreshed. The first time you enter a buildConfiguration, a project re-scan will have to be done, which will take a few seconds as usual. Once complete, we cache the result so that hot-swapping becomes very responsive, as illustrated below. You can still manually re-scan when you know the cached recipe list is no longer accurate (because you added or deleted recipes, for instance). Like before, this cache is persistent across VS Code sessions, so you don’t have to wait for a re-scan when you restart your favorite IDE.

New error handling is also required. We also implemented the required logic for corner cases, like changing the settings.json. Everything should refresh appropriately and automatically. Since lengthy re-scans are also more frequent with this update, we improved their rendering by making the recipes panel appear as “loading” when a scan is ongoing, in addition to the bottom left status bar and terminal views.

Support for the new devtool modify –debug-build option

Adrian Freihofer has recently pushed a new devtool feature that passes “DEBUG_BUILD=1” to the recipe’s workspace. This adds debugging information to your packages which combines very well with our devtool ide-sdk workflow. If you haven’t already, you should check it out! Once you have created a devtool workspace, you can right-click on it and run the “Configure VSCode SDK” command. It will generate a VS Code configuration for CMake and Meson workspaces for linting and remote SSH debugging.

Since –debug-build will most of the time be excellent for our workflow, we now automatically detect if your Yocto version is compatible and enable it. Some users, however, may want to keep the old behavior which can be achieved with the new “bitbake.disableDevtoolDebugBuild” setting.

Presentation at the Yocto Project Virtual Summit 2024.12

I gave a talk on the Typescript and BitBake alchemy that runs behind the scenes. I discussed some challenges we faced and the optimizations we implemented to address them. The goal was to introduce more people to the technologies at hand, to make it more accessible to contribute. We were thrilled that this presentation sparked a lot of interest and ideas for future work with the community! If you want to replay this presentation, it will soon be available on streaming platforms.

Links and resources

• Install the extension from the VS Code extension marketplace
• Contribute to the extension on our Github Repository
• Check out the presentation from Yocto Project Summit 2023.11v
• Check out the extension at Open-VSX Marketplace (now verified, thanks to Michael Halstead!): Yocto-bitbake
• Test it out in other IDEs through this guide