What does "virtual/" mean?

What does "virtual/" mean?

[Paul D. DeRocco]

I see lots of references to "virtual/kernel", as opposed to simply "kernel".
The bitbake docs show "virtual/whatever" and "virtual/package" in some of
its syntactic examples. But what does the "virtual/" prefix actually mean?
Google coughs up endless uses of the term, as though everyone knows what it
means, but no explanation of it.

-- 

Ciao,               Paul D. DeRocco
Paul                mailto:pderocco@ix.netcom.com 
 

Re: What does "virtual/" mean?

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi Paul,

On Wednesday 12 June 2013 01:43:31 Paul D. DeRocco wrote:
> I see lots of references to "virtual/kernel", as opposed to simply "kernel".
> The bitbake docs show "virtual/whatever" and "virtual/package" in some of
> its syntactic examples. But what does the "virtual/" prefix actually mean?
> Google coughs up endless uses of the term, as though everyone knows what it
> means, but no explanation of it.

It's simply a convention to indicate the particular item is not a real package 
but a virtual placeholder that could be configured at build time to point to 
one of a selection of different providers; i.e. a recipe that requires kernel 
headers could have virtual/kernel in its DEPENDS rather than having to name a 
specific kernel recipe and the distro or machine configuration can set 
PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel to point to whatever real kernel recipe is 
desired. 

Cheers,
Paul

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Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre