Several of the BitBake UI's call the getEvent() method of the servers BBUIEventQueue to request messages for display, however; when using the none server (the default server) no events are ever received. Use of the waitEvent() method allows the UI to receive events but introduces lag and blocking of UI threads. If I switch to the xmlrpc server I am able to use the getEvent() method to request messages from the server.
There is a fix for this in contrib branch paule/none-server-fix (now rebased against recent master). http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit/cgit.cgi/poky-contrib/commit/?h=paule/none-server-fix&id=d3e5d6f6e98b16e4f57e770e35a1b9b76fd1c0eb
Fix now merged into master
Verify fixed