Bitbake tries to fetch sources from unavailable URL and they fail - gcc

Question

I'm currently trying to set up an environment for Yocto project for my personal study.
I was clueless about where to start Yocto so I bought the book Embedded Linux Projects Using Yocto Project Cookbook but it keeps failing to build the environment.
I've run only simple commands. I ran source oe-init-build-env <dir name> to make a directory and ran bitbake core-image-minimal.
But bitbake command keeps giving me errors like this. This is the log.
WARNING: Host distribution "Ubuntu-18.04" has not been validated with this version of the build system; you may possibly experience unexpected failures. It is recommended that you use a tested distribution.
Parsing recipes: 100%
|#################################################################################| Time: 00:00:25Parsing of 891 .bb files complete (0 cached, 891 parsed). 1287 targets, 61 skipped, 0 masked, 0 errors.
NOTE: Resolving any missing task queue dependencies
Build Configuration:
BB_VERSION = "1.24.0"
BUILD_SYS = "x86_64-linux"
NATIVELSBSTRING = "Ubuntu-18.04"
TARGET_SYS = "arm-poky-linux-gnueabi"
MACHINE = "qemuarm"
DISTRO = "poky"
DISTRO_VERSION = "1.7.3"
TUNE_FEATURES = "arm armv5 thumb dsp"
TARGET_FPU = "soft"
meta
meta-yocto
meta-yocto-bsp = "dizzy:58863ad092c9a279e305c841dbb4353de2ecfae8"
NOTE: Preparing runqueue
NOTE: Executing SetScene Tasks
NOTE: Executing RunQueue Tasks
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.8.tar.xz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://www.multiprecision.org/mpc/download/mpc-1.0.2.tar.gz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL ftp://ftp.gmplib.org/pub/gmp-6.0.0/gmp-6.0.0a.tar.bz2, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/download/kconfig-frontends/kconfig-frontends-3.12.0.0.tar.xz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://download.gna.org/cryptodev-linux/cryptodev-linux-1.6.tar.gz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Checksum failure encountered with download of http://www.bzip.org/1.0.6/bzip2-1.0.6.tar.gz - will attempt other sources if available
WARNING: Renaming /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/downloads/bzip2-1.0.6.tar.gz to /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/downloads/bzip2-1.0.6.tar.gz_bad-checksum_2ae3e6c958d83d2855a37f13fe29fd95
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://gnome-build-stage-1.googlecode.com/files/uuid-1.6.2.tar.gz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Checksum failure encountered with download of http://rpm5.org/files/popt/popt-1.16.tar.gz - will attempt other sources if available
WARNING: Renaming /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/downloads/popt-1.16.tar.gz to /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/downloads/popt-1.16.tar.gz_bad-checksum_9e09d0bf772649c5ba385c48ba2d3547
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://zlib.net/pigz/pigz-2.3.1.tar.gz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Checksum failure encountered with download of http://www.rpm5.org/files/rpm/rpm-5.4/rpm-5.4.14-0.20131024.src.rpm;extract=rpm-5.4.14.tar.gz - will attempt other sources if available
WARNING: Renaming /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/downloads/rpm-5.4.14-0.20131024.src.rpm to /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/downloads/rpm-5.4.14-0.20131024.src.rpm_bad-checksum_6a8d9bc6a7e0162d7ff72fefc9e841e5
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://downloads.sourceforge.net/expat/expat-2.1.0.tar.gz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL ftp://invisible-island.net/byacc/byacc-20140422.tgz, attempting MIRRORS if available
WARNING: Failed to fetch URL http://pkg-shadow.alioth.debian.org/releases/shadow-4.2.1.tar.xz, attempting MIRRORS if available
I checked the URLs in the log and it turned out they are all 404 pages. And most importantly, it terminates by showing this message.
ERROR: Error executing a python function in /opt/yocto/poky/meta/recipes-devtools/gcc/gcc-source_4.9.bb:
The stack trace of python calls that resulted in this exception/failure was:
File: 'do_preconfigure', lineno: 12, function: <module>
0008: cmd = d.expand("sed -i 's/BUILD_INFO=info/BUILD_INFO=/' /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/work-shared/gcc-4.9.1-r0/gcc-4.9.1/gcc/configure")
0009: subprocess.check_output(cmd, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, shell=True)
0010:
0011:
*** 0012:do_preconfigure(d)
0013:
File: 'do_preconfigure', lineno: 5, function: do_preconfigure
0001:
0002:def do_preconfigure(d):
0003: import subprocess
0004: cmd = d.expand('PATH=/opt/yocto/poky/scripts:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/bin/arm-poky-linux-gnueabi:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/qemuarm/usr/bin/crossscripts:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/sbin:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/bin:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/sbin:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/bin:/opt/yocto/poky/scripts:/opt/yocto/poky/bitbake/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/mnt/c/Program Files/WindowsApps/CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu18.04onWindows_1804.2020.824.0_x64__79rhkp1fndgsc:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32:/mnt/c/WINDOWS:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/OpenSSH/:/mnt/c/Users/kimth/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WindowsApps:/mnt/c/Users/kimth/AppData/Local/Programs/MiKTeX 2.9/miktex/bin/x64/:/mnt/c/Users/kimth/AppData/Roaming/TinyTeX/bin/win32:/snap/bin cd /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/work-shared/gcc-4.9.1-r0/gcc-4.9.1 && gnu-configize')
*** 0005: subprocess.check_output(cmd, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, shell=True)
0006: # See 0044-gengtypes.patch, we need to regenerate this file
0007: bb.utils.remove(d.expand("/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/work-shared/gcc-4.9.1-r0/gcc-4.9.1/gcc/gengtype-lex.c"))
0008: cmd = d.expand("sed -i 's/BUILD_INFO=info/BUILD_INFO=/' /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/work-shared/gcc-4.9.1-r0/gcc-4.9.1/gcc/configure")
0009: subprocess.check_output(cmd, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT, shell=True)
File: '/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py', lineno: 223, function: check_output
0219: if retcode:
0220: cmd = kwargs.get("args")
0221: if cmd is None:
0222: cmd = popenargs[0]
*** 0223: raise CalledProcessError(retcode, cmd, output=output)
0224: return output
0225:
0226:
0227:def list2cmdline(seq):
Exception: CalledProcessError: Command 'PATH=/opt/yocto/poky/scripts:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/bin/arm-poky-linux-gnueabi:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/qemuarm/usr/bin/crossscripts:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/sbin:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/usr/bin:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/sbin:/opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm/tmp/sysroots/x86_64-linux/bin:/opt/yocto/poky/scripts:/opt/yocto/poky/bitbake/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/mnt/c/Program Files/WindowsApps/CanonicalGroupLimited.Ubuntu18.04onWindows_1804.2020.824.0_x64__79rhkp1fndgsc:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32:/mnt/c/WINDOWS:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/OpenSSH/:/mnt/c/Users/kimth/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WindowsApps:/mnt/c/Users/kimth/AppData/Local/Programs/MiKTeX 2.9/miktex/bin/x64/:/mnt/c/Users/kimth/AppData/Roaming/TinyTeX/bin/win32:/snap/bin cd /opt/yocto/poky/qemuarm
I feel like I need to modify conf files to fetch available URLs but I'm new to Yocto and Bitbake so I'm very lost now. I would appreciate if anyone could tell me where to find solutions. Thank you and stay safe everyone.

Answer 1

You seem to use quite an old yocto version 1.7.3 while there is already 3.3 released. This means also you try to build recipes for some packages that are also old and hence some URLs might be unavailable. Might it be an option for you to use a newer version?
If this is no option for you, one thing to try would be setting MIRROR (see [1]) to a mirror [2] where those packages are still available. But this approach I would not prefer.
[1] https://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/1.7/bitbake-user-manual/bitbake-user-manual.html#var-MIRRORS
[2] could be: http://downloads.yoctoproject.org/mirror/sources/

Answer 2

1.7.3 is a very old release of the project, originally released in 2015 with a last point release in 2016. The fetcher warnings you see aren't the problem, they're warnings but it will fall back to the project mirrors. If it hadn't fallen back correctly, it would have shown errors as well as the warnings. The bigger problem is in fact this:
WARNING: Host distribution "Ubuntu-18.04" has not been validated with this version of the build system; you may possibly experience unexpected failures. It is recommended that you use a tested distribution.
Since Ubuntu 18.04 is three years newer than the project release you're using, there is no way it would be compatible with that release. You need to use a host OS from the era of the release, so Ubuntu 16.04 may work better. This is because the host OS provides gcc used to build the cross tools and the newer gcc versions don't tend to work with 100% of old code without tweaks.
So in short, use an older distro if you want to try and get that to build.