There are hundreds of meta layers from the Yocto Project, OpenEmbedded, communities, and companies that should be manually cloned inside the project source directory to be used. We can find them at http://git.yoctoproject.org/ or http://layers.openembedded.org.

In order to include, for example, meta-openembedded in our project, we can change the content of the configuration files or use BitBake command lines. To do so, we need first to fetch the layer's source code. Please run the following command from your Poky source directory:

$ git clone git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded -b rocko

We can now add a new layer by changing the build/conf/bblayer.conf file and adding the absolute path to the new meta layer directory, as shown in the following source code. The highlighted line is the one to be added. The others are the default values for this file:

An alternative to manually editing build/conf/bblayers.conf is to use the bitbake-layers tool to do the inclusion for us. This can be done using the following command from the build directory:

$ bitbake-layers add-layer ../meta-openembedded/meta-oe

In the previous BitBake command, the added layer is parsed and the meta-openembedded/meta-oe metadata is included in BitBake's database, allowing the packages inside the added layer to be used.