Bitbake build consumes more space

Question

I recently started using Bitbake for building Yocto. Everytime I build, it consumes more space and currently I'm running out of disk space. The images are not getting overwritten. A set of new files with timestamp is getting created for every build. I have deleted old files from build/tmp/deploy/images/. But it doesn't make much difference in the disk free space. Is there any other locations from where I can delete stuff?

The error I observe during build is:

WARNING: The free space of source/build/tmp (/dev/sda4) is running low (0.999GB left)
ERROR: No new tasks can be executed since the disk space monitor action is "STOPTASKS"!
WARNING: The free space of source/build/sstate-cache (/dev/sda4) is running low (0.999GB left)
ERROR: No new tasks can be executed since the disk space monitor action is "STOPTASKS"!
WARNING: The free space of source/build/downloads (/dev/sda4) is running low (0.999GB left)
ERROR: No new tasks can be executed since the disk space monitor action is "STOPTASKS"!

Kindly suggest some pointers to avoid this issue.

Answer 1

In order of effectiveness and how easy the fix is:

• Buy more disk space: Putting $TMPDIR on an SSD of its own helps a lot and removes the need to micromanage.
• Delete $TMPDIR (build/tmp): old images, old packages and workdirectories/sysroots for MACHINEs you aren't currently building for accumulate and can take quite a lot of space. You can normally just delete the whole $TMPDIR once in a while: as long as you're using sstate-cache the next build should still be pretty fast.
• Delete $SSTATE_DIR (build/sstate-cache): If you do a lot of builds sstate itself accumulates over time. Deleting the directory is safe but the next build will take a long time as everything will be rebuilt.
• Delete $DL_DIR (build/downloads): If you use a build directory for a long time (while pulling updates from master or changing to newer branch) the obsolete downloads keep taking disk space. Keep in mind that deleting the directory will mean re-downloading everything. Looking at just the largest files and deleting the old versions may be a useful compromise here.