When attempting to create an SDK based on core-image-minimal, the install fails as components of eglibc (eglibc-utils-2.16-r17) require 'bash'. I suspect that we either need to remove the bash dependency (bash scripts) or add bash as a known runtime dependency of eglibc. It might be easiest to audit the bash scripts in eglibc-utils and convert them to work with standard posix shell. Note, I believe some of this work has been done upstream.
I tested this with the latest master (52a9ae643f8a0c7856681cfb9c6c0521ace253fd) and the toolchain tarball is created as expected. You can reopen it if you provide a method to reproduce it. I was unable to...
The eglibc-utils package includes /usr/bin/tzselect. This script requires 'bash' at runtime, but there is no RDEPENDS_${PN}-utils in the recipe. So for a completely fresh build: bitbake -c populate_sdk core-image-minimal You will get a failure, because nothing else in the system requires bash. To fix the problem the bash-isms in eglibc should be removed, or an explicit dependency on bash should be declared. (The former is a better solution.)
Possible solution: http://www.eglibc.org/archives/patches/msg00671.html
I just did a completely fresh bitbake -c populate_sdk core-image-minimal and the build finished successfully. No tmp/ no sstate-cache/. Just the downloads/ directory.
Also, it would be very helpful if you provided the commit you used to reproduce it, MACHINE, SDKMACHINE and what other steps other than running "bitbake -c populate_sdk core-image-minimal" you ran.
FYI I'm testing a reworked version of the patch linked above.
Patch has been sent for review.
Fix merged in the following commit: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=2f85e62b896ef71e616b5645360cb6750fe4514e (The easiest way to reproduce the original issue would be to add eglibc-utils to core-image-minimal before this change.)