## Chapter 6. BitBake

BitBake is a program written in Python that interprets the metadata used by the OpenEmbedded build system. At some point, developers wonder what actually happens when you enter:

         $ bitbake core-image-sato

This chapter provides an overview of what happens behind the scenes from BitBake's perspective.

### Note

BitBake strives to be a generic "task" executor that is capable of handling complex dependency relationships. As such, it has no real knowledge of what the tasks being executed actually do. BitBake just considers a list of tasks with dependencies and handles metadata that consists of variables in a certain format that get passed to the tasks.