There is already some partial work on this area [1], using a minimal instead of a sato image but at the end, the best is to use world, making the test case completely distro agnostic. [1] http://lists.openembedded.org/pipermail/openembedded-core/2017-January/130897.html
The following commit created by RP solves partially this bug commit 90c1bb7569e3c38cf406d726edb8cc719e4df3fc Author: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> Date: Fri Apr 7 15:26:30 2017 +0100 selftest/sstatetests: Replace glibc-initial with linux-libc-headers The intent in these tests was to find something early in the bootstrap process to run tests against which didn't require long build times. This breaks with the removal of the glibc-initial do_build target. Replacing it with linux-libc-headers seems like a good choice and simplifies the conditionals too. (From OE-Core rev: c37d610272f9d0a506334ff9f724c025acace137) but there are still some image targets that need to be replaced by world if possible.
This is an enhancement and medium, so changing proper settings.
Too late for M4. This is definitely not a priority (not breaking anything at current testing) so moving to 2.5M2.
comment 1 resolves this problem. There is no need to change the target to 'world', because all supported oe-core distros can construct current targets (defined on the test cases)