This topic is long due. In the previous chapters we discussed tasks, but not in much detail. Tasks can be considered as units of execution to perform a specific function, or a set of related functions that can be combined together. The helloword tasks can be listed using the -c listtasks option of BitBake:
$ bitbake -c listtasks helloworld
Even for this basic recipe list, there are more than 20 tasks. In this output, each task contains a short description of it, which should be consulted first. We are skipping the list for brevity. Most of the tasks are not seen in the recipes. Why? We are content with the default implementations provided to us, which are automatically used if we do not want to override them. All these tasks are prefixed by do_. Here, we will discuss the most common tasks, to develop our understanding of them.
