If /dev/shm doesn't exist (e.g. in a chroot environment) or is not writable, you'll get "OSError: [Errno 38] Function not implemented" or "OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied" with a traceback, which doesn't really help to explain what is wrong. We should just check on startup whether this is present e.g. in sanity.bbclass, and bail out with an appropriate message if it isn't.
Merged to master: http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=fd8dcd7b88925dbb8203b0d2ec6ac62fe667676c
Verified [ionut@ionut-fedora build]$ bitbake core-image-minimal FATAL: /dev/shm does not exist or is not writable [ionut@ionut-fedora build]$ cat /proc/mounts | grep shm tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs ro,seclabel,relatime 0 0 [ionut@ionut-fedora build]$