[Bug 3324 - 'x11' not in DISTRO_FEATURES while building BARYON] exposed the fact that VA_FEATURES unnecessarily brings with it a dependency on X11 and to remove that dependency VA_FEATURES must be set to the empty string. This is from the following in libva.inc: DEPENDS = "libxext libxfixes libdrm mesa-dri" This shouldn't be necessary - libva should be able to be used without any of those dependencies. There should however be a way to include only what's appropriate with respect to libva. libva supports a number of 'surfaces' including X11, tpi, glx, egl, and it should be possible to include support for each of these independently and not include the others. In this case, excluding x11 support from libva would address the particular problem encountered in 3324. Note that with respect to the EMGD-based BSPs (crownbay, fri2, sys940x), it's not currently possible to build without libva even if VA_FEATURES is set to the empty string (it currently can't be set to the empty string - see [Bug 2551 - EMGD requires video acceleration]), so there's no way to turn off the X11 dependency for those BSPs until 2551 is fixed).
Here's the release note for 1.3: BSPs that include VA_FEATURES unnecessarily add a dependency on X11. To remove this dependency, users can specify the following in their local.conf and in so doing disable video acceleration for the BSP: VA_FEATURES ?= "" Note however that the above doesn't work for the crownbay and fri2 BSPs because those BSPs use EMGD, which still requires the va-intel component even if the other video acceleration components are removed: VA_FEATURES ?= "va-intel" The above introduces the X11 dependency, so in essence, for the crownbay and fri2 BSPs, the X11 dependency can't be removed. This problem is addressed by Yocto Bug 3373 [meta-intel: VA_FEATURES unnecessarily causes X11 dependency via libva].
A patch sent to meta-intel ML which will fix this issue.
Fixed by meta-intel commit: 95c9b6ced869ebab7c778b2741c963496140c00f