What are the differences between Yocto Poky and Texas Instruments Arago?

Question

I am very new to this field so my terminology may be incorrect.

My goal is to build a custom linux distribution for an embedded device equipped with Texas Instruments AM335x ARM processor.

I played a little with Yocto 1.6.1 (Daisy release), bitbake and HOB (a total life-saver for a beginner).
After that I discovered the Arago project quick start from Texas Instruments. Looks like it doesn't need the Yocto files at all and instead it re-downloads bitbake, the meta-openembedded layer and a new meta-linaro layer (that I never heard of).

As my understanding, I need the meta-ti layer to build for AM335x. Can I copy it with the other Yocto layers and just "use it" with Poky?
If I build with Arago, can I use HOB and the other Yocto layers?

What are the differences between Yocto/Poky and Arago? Are they compatible in some way? Does Arago supports running images with qemu?

Answer 1

Lots of questions!

arago is basically an old build of Yocto + TI's layers for their hardware. Theoretically you can take TI's layers and put them with the current build of Poky, but in my experience you will need to update some of the TI recipes. I haven't tried it lately, but Arago is compatible with Yocto at a basic level. Main issues are that TI layers have a bunch of bbappends recipes that assume they are modifying particular recipes (and sometimes particular SHA commits) and you can expect errors you will need to fix.

I have not been able to get Arago images to run on qemu, qemu always crashes. But maybe I don't know enough about Qemu. YMMV.