Poky makes various assumptions about "tar" being GNU tar.

There is no way to override the location of tar (e.g. TAR=gtar) for distros that use a different default "tar".


I've had successful builds with libarchive tar by skipping the check in sanity.bbclass, replacing
cmd = "tar --xattrs --xattrs-include='*' -cf - -S -C %s -p . | tar --xattrs --xattrs-include='*' -xf - -C %s" % (src, dst)
in poky/meta/lib/oe/path.py with
cmd = "tar c --xattrs -f - -S -C %s -p . | tar x --xattrs -f - -C %s" % (src, dst)
and replacing (in the same file)
cmd = "cd %s; find . -type d -print | tar --xattrs --xattrs-include='*' -cf - -S -C %s -p --no-recursion --files-from - | tar --xattrs --xattrs-include='*' -xhf - -C %s" % (src, src, dst)
with
cmd = "cd %s; find . -type d -print | tar c --xattrs -f - -S -C %s -p --no-recursion --files-from - | tar x --xattrs -f - -C %s" % (src, src, dst)


Not sure if there's any unwanted side effects from using libarchive tar -- so not sure if this should be fixed the way I've described (with a check for which tar implementation is being used) or simply with a check for different tar implementations instead of hardcoding that "tar" is the one to use.

All distros I've checked that use a different implementation as their default tar have GNU tar available in their repositories as well (by another name, typically gtar).