Adding a wks file earlier in the search path is not taken into account automatically when bitbaking an image recipe using wic. One need to run bitbake -c cleansstate for the new file to be taken into account. To reproduce the issue: 1. Init (use default WKS_FILE="qemux86-directdisk.wks") . oe-init-build-env echo 'IMAGE_FSTYPES += "wic"' >> conf/local.conf 2. First clean build rm -f wic/qemux86-directdisk.wks bitbake core-image-minimal -c cleansstate && bitbake core-image-minimal 3. Create an override for WKS_FILE (earlier in WKS_SEARCH_PATH) and introduce an error (a very small partition size) so that we can see it happen (or not). mkdir -p wic echo "part / --source rootfs --fstype=ext4 --fixed-size 1M" > wic/qemux86-directdisk.wks 4. Build again bitbake core-image-minimal ... NOTE: Tasks Summary: Attempted 4670 tasks of which 4670 didn't need to be rerun and all succeeded. => Nothing gets built, whereas we should see this error: | ERROR: Actual rootfs size (28713 kB) is larger than allowed size 1024 kB I have proposed a patch here: https://lists.openembedded.org/g/openembedded-core/message/216887
Fixed by: https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=ef96e2efcd95785e29ff7c62b2cb76e26f46f5ec https://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/commit/?id=ef96e2efcd95785e29ff7c62b2cb76e26f46f5ec