Yocto recipes inherit base.bbclass and hence their default behavior is to look for a Makefile, makefile, or GNUmakefile and use GNU make to build the package. If your package already contains a Makefile, then all you need to worry about are the arguments that need to be passed to make. make arguments can be passed using the EXTRA_OEMAKE variable, and a do_install override that calls the oe_runmake install needs to be provided, otherwise an empty install is run. For example, the mingetty recipe is based on a Makefile and looks as follows:

SUMMARY = "Compact getty terminal handler for virtual consoles only"             
SECTION = "console/utils"                                                        
HOMEPAGE = "http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingetty/"                           
LICENSE = "GPLv2"                                                                
PR = "r3"                                                                        
  
 
                                                                              
LIC_FILES_CHKSUM = "file://COPYING;md5=0c56db0143f4f80c369ee3af7425af6e"         
SRC_URI = "${SOURCEFORGE_MIRROR}/${BPN}/${BP}.tar.gz"                            
 
                                                                                
SRC_URI[md5sum] = "2a75ad6487ff271424ffc00a64420990"                             
SRC_URI[sha256sum] = "0f55c90ba4faa913d91ef99cbf5cb2eb4dbe2780314c3bb17953f849c8cddd17" 
 
                                                                                
# substitute our CFLAGS for "-O2 -Wall -W -pipe"                                 
#                                                                                
EXTRA_OEMAKE = "CC='${CC}'                                                       
                CFLAGS='${CFLAGS} -D_GNU_SOURCE'"                                
 
                                                                                
do_install(){                                                                    
    install -d ${D}${mandir}/man8 ${D}/${base_sbindir}                           
    oe_runmake install DESTDIR=${D}                                              
}                                                                                
 
                                                                                
inherit update-alternatives                                                      
                                                                                 
ALTERNATIVE_${PN} = "getty"                                                      
ALTERNATIVE_LINK_NAME[getty] = "${base_sbindir}/getty"                           
ALTERNATIVE_TARGET[getty] = "${base_sbindir}/mingetty"                           
ALTERNATIVE_PRIORITY = "10"