The YOCTO-project can do amazing things, but requires a very decent build machine, as by nature when you build everything from scratch it does require a lot of compilation. So the ultimate goal has to be to perform only the necessary steps in each run. Understanding task hashing The thing is that bitbake uses a task hashing to determine, which tasks (such as compilation, packaging, a.s.o.) are actually required to be performed. As tasks depend on each other, this information is also embedded into a hash, so the last task for a recipe is ultimately depending on the variable that are used for this specific task and every task before. You could visualize this by using a utility called bitbake-dumpsig , which produces output like this basewhitelist: {'SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH', 'FILESEXTRAPATHS', 'PRSERV_HOST', 'THISDIR', 'TMPDIR', 'WORKDIR', 'EXTERNAL_TOOLCHAIN', 'FILE', 'BB_TASKHASH', 'USER', 'BBSERVER&