Federico,

Thanks for your reply.  I did build a recipe for a tar.gz source archive previously, which worked.  But for the RPM I felt like I was missing something.  Meanwhile, my multilib build for core-image-base is failing with the error below.  This is without any custom recipes.  I am not sure what to about this missing manifest file.  I thought perhaps it was SDK related so I tried running bitbake core-image-base -c populate_sdk... but got a similar error.   If I knew the root cause of this error, I might be able to fix it.  But it seems that unless I've setup local.conf incorrectly, doing multilib should just work out of the box.  Note that I successfully built core-image-base WITHOUT multilib configured in my local.conf.  Simply adding the multilib config entries causes this error (local.conf attached).

ERROR: core-image-base-1.0-r0 do_prepare_recipe_sysroot: Manifest /home/parraid/var-fsl-yocto/build_xwayland/tmp/sstate-control/manifest-x86_64_x86_64-nativesdk-lib32-qemuwrapper-cross.populate_sysroot not found in imx8mp_var_dart armv7at2hf-neon-mx8mp armv7ahf-neon-mx8mp armv7at2hf-vfp-mx8mp armv7ahf-vfp-mx8mp armv6thf-vfp-mx8mp armv6hf-vfp-mx8mp armv5tehf-vfp-mx8mp armv5ehf-vfp-mx8mp armv5thf-vfp-mx8mp armv5hf-vfp-mx8mp armv8a-mx8mp armv8a-crc-crypto armv8a-crypto armv8a-crc armv8a aarch64 allarch x86_64_x86_64-nativesdk (variant 'lib32')?
ERROR: Logfile of failure stored in: /home/parraid/var-fsl-yocto/build_xwayland/tmp/work/imx8mp_var_dart-fslc-linux/core-image-base/1.0-r0/temp/log.do_prepare_recipe_sysroot.2763965
ERROR: Task (/home/parraid/var-fsl-yocto/sources/poky/meta/recipes-core/images/core-image-base.bb:do_prepare_recipe_sysroot) failed with exit code '1'

I feel if I can get this error resolved, it would be tremendous progress. 

Thanks again!

David