Most developers won't be interested in keeping the whole build output for every package, so it is recommended to configure your project to remove it with the following configuration in your conf/local.conf file:

INHERIT += "rm_work" 

But at the same time, configuring it for all packages means that you won't be able to develop or debug them.

You can add a list of packages to exclude from cleaning by adding them to the RM_WORK_EXCLUDE variable. For example, if you are going to do BSP work, a good setting might be:

RM_WORK_EXCLUDE += "linux-wandboard u-boot-fslc" 

Remember that you can use a custom template local.conf.sample configuration file in your own layer to keep these configurations and apply them for all projects so that they can be shared across all developers.

On a normal build, the -dbg packages that include debug symbols are not needed. To avoid creating -dbg packages, do this:

INHIBIT_PACKAGE_DEBUG_SPLIT = "1" 

Once the build finishes, you can find the output images in the tmp/deploy/images/qemuarm directory inside your build directory.

You can test run your images on the QEMU emulator by executing this:

$ runqemu qemuarm core-image-minimal  

The runqemu script included in Poky's scripts directory is a launch wrapper around the QEMU machine emulator to simplify its usage.

The Yocto Project also has a set of precompiled images for supported hardware platforms that can be downloaded from http://downloads.yoctoproject.org/releases/yocto/yocto-2.4/machines/.