Creating a new machine to be used by Poky is a straightforward task. It essentially provides the information needed for a machine to work. The bootloader, kernel, and hardware support drivers must be checked before starting to integrate the board into the BSP layer.

The Yocto Project supports x86-32, x86-64, ARM32, ARM64, MIPS, MIPS64, and PowerPC, representing the most currently-used embedded architectures.

The prevailing set of variables used in a machine definition is as follows:

• TARGET_ARCH: This sets the machine architecture, for example, ARM and i586
• PREFERRED_PROVIDER_virtual/kernel: This overrides the default kernel (linux-yocto) in case you need to use a specific one
• SERIAL_CONSOLES: This defines serial consoles and their speeds
• MACHINE_FEATURES: This describes hardware features, so the software stack needed is included in the images by default
• KERNEL_IMAGETYPE: This is used to choose the kernel image type, for example, zImage and uImage
• IMAGE_FSTYPES: This sets the generated filesystem image types, for example, tar.gz, ext4, and ubifs

You can see examples of machine definition files inside the Poky source code in meta-yocto-bsp/conf/machine/. When describing a new machine, we should pay special attention to specific features supported by it in MACHINE_FEATURES. This way, the needed software to support these features is installed into the images. The current available values for MACHINE_FEATURES are listed as follows: