Buildroot

Buildroot is a nice, simple, and efficient embedded Linux build system.

Important links

• Buildroot main page
• Bug tracker
• Autobuilders results
• Project patchwork

Developer days

Future:

• Buildroot Developer Days, 4-6 February 2019, Brussels, Belgium, after FOSDEM

Past:

• Buildroot Developer Days, 20-21 October 2018, Edinburgh, UK, before ELCE
• Buildroot Developer Days, 5-6 February 2018, Brussels, Belgium, after FOSDEM
• Buildroot Developer Days, 21-22 October 2017, Prague, Czech Republic, before ELCE.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 6-7 February 2017, Brussels, Belgium, after FOSDEM
• Buildroot Developer Days, 14-16 October 2016, Berlin, Germany, after ELCE.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 1-2 February 2016, Brussels, Belgium, after FOSDEM
• Buildroot Developer Days, 3-4 October 2015, Dublin, Ireland, before ELC-E (report).
• Buildroot Developer Days, 2-3 February 2015, Brussels, Belgium, after FOSDEM.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 11-12 October 2014, Düsseldorf, Germany, before ELC-E.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 3-4 February 2014, Brussels, Belgium, after FOSDEM.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 26-27 October 2013, Edinburgh UK, after ELC-E.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 4-5 February 2013, Brussels Belgium, after FOSDEM.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 3-4 November 2012, Barcelona Spain, before ELC-E.
• Buildroot Developer Days, 3 February 2012, Brussels Belgium, before FOSDEM (report)
• Buildroot Developer Days, 29 October 2011, Prague, Czech Republic, after ELCE (report)

Talks

This section gathers the list of talks given about Buildroot, as well as the slides and video when available.

Past:

• Buildroot: What's New?, Thomas Petazzoni, Embedded Linux Conference, 12-14 March, Portland, Oregon. Slides, Video.
• Buildroot: What's New?, Thomas Petazzoni, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, 23-25 October, Prague, Czech Republic. Slides, Video.
• Buildroot: Making Embedded Linux Easy? A Real-Life Example, Yann E. MORIN, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, 23-25 October, Prague, Czech Republic. Slides, Video.
• Tutorial: Learning the Basics of Buildroot, Thomas Petazzoni, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, October 5 - 7, 2015, Dublin, Ireland. Slides, Video.
• "Buildroot: a deep dive into the core", Thomas Petazzoni, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, 13-15 October 2014, Düsseldorf, Germany. Slides.
• Buildroot: what's new, Thomas Petazzoni, Embedded Linux Conference, 1 May 2014, San Jose, United States. Slides, HD video, Low-res video, Audio only
• "Buildroot: what is new", Peter Korsgaard, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, 25 October 2013, Edinburgh, UK. Slides, Video.

Accounting

This section gathers all the income and expenses of the Buildroot project.

Current balance: + €381.04

• 2015-01-08: + €423.14 : Google paid €423.14 ($500) for mentoring a student for the GSoC 2014
• 2016-02-07: - € 42.10 : thank-you gift to Niel for helping host the DevDays in Brussels the past few years (T-Shirt: €24.50, Mug: €10.00, shipping: €14.50, rebate: €6.90)

Notes: until we have a legal entity representing Buildroot, that money is held by Yann E. MORIN on behalf the Buildroot project. Accounting is handled in Euro. Update 2017-05-14: funds have been transfered to the association's account.

List of forks

• Bsquask SDK. A Rasberry-Pi related fork.
• C.H.I.P. Buildroot NextThing fork for the 9$ computer
• Gadget Buildroot Yet another NextThing fork
• [1]. Another RPi related fork, with a lot of focus on Qt5 and GStreamer (appears to be defunct).
• Buildroot Submodule. Not a fork, but a convenience layer on top of buildroot.
• Experimental 'shell' around Buildroot. Another wrapper around Buildroot, to help manage projects.

Todo list

This is a list of improvements that we would like to see in buildroot. Feel free to add suggestions here. If you're working on one of these items, put your name and the date behind it, to avoid duplicate work.

There are a number of patches that have been determined to be useful but for various reasons nobody currently has time to review or test them. Anybody, especially a person new to buildroot, is welcome to adopt these patches and resubmit them to the mailing list. These patches can be viewed by looking at the following link - http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/project/buildroot/list/?state=1&delegate=7151

Packages

Note: if you start working on any of these packages, please edit this section to indicate it. If the package is proposed in a bug report, please also update the bug report. Sending a mail to the mailing list also never hurts, you never know that someone else started working on it without following this guideline.

Important

• Bump nfs-utils to 2.32, and send upstream the patches we have in Buildroot
• At package: Submit the remaining of our patches to the new maintainers. Merge Request has been open: https://salsa.debian.org/debian/at/merge_requests/3
• Update polkit and udisks. Updating polkit is complicated since starting from version 106, they depend on Spidermonkey, the Javascript engine from Mozilla.

Nice to have

• Create a package for the Qt5 demo/benchmark application at https://github.com/prabindh/xgxperf.
• Packages proposed in bug reports (often with patch)
  • openvz https://bugs.busybox.net/show_bug.cgi?id=405
  • rdiff-backup https://bugs.busybox.net/show_bug.cgi?id=1309
  • wxWidgets https://bugs.busybox.net/show_bug.cgi?id=261

Toolchain

• Add the support for the x86-64 x32 capable toolchain. See http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/561904/
• Add the support for the Aarch64 ilp32 capable toolchain (for now the gcc/binutils/glibc upstream support is not ready yet). See http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/buildroot/2015-August/137356.html, http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/506803/, http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/506800/, http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/506801/

Documentation

• Document how to contribute (how often to repost, what to expect, ...) basic guide
• Document that package patches should be sent upstream

Core Buildroot infrastructure

• Investigate adding support for ICECC. See also https://www.pengutronix.de/en/2018-09-13-fixing-icecc.html.

• Several improvements are possible in the download infrastructure (even after all the improvements that were already done):
  • Rename the downloaded files so they include the package name and version. Special care has to be taken for primary and secondary sites, and for extra downloads (including patches).
  • Split between FOO_SITE and FOO_SOURCE shouldn't be necessary. Or it could be made optional, i.e. make it possible to specify the full path in FOO_SOURCE.

• Locale handling is broken: it doesn't take into account the alias file when purging aliases. See this mail from patchwork cleanup #3 and this patch that also fixes a locale problem, but not everything. Tests for this are also required.

• It would be nice to add a br-configure script in host/usr/bin for autotools-based packages. Run ...BUILDROOTSDK/usr/bin/br-configure --enable-foo --disable-bar, and the br-configure script would call the ./configure script in the current directory passing all the right options (--host, and all environment variables CC, LD, AS, AR and such).

• Add instrumentation scripts to analyse package installed files:
  • find libraries with wrong RPATH/RUNPATH tags
  • detect unused .so libs (eg. shared libs that are not DT_NEEDED by anything - note: only detect those libs, don't remove: can be used as plugin (dlopen), or used by an application built outside Buildroot)

• A script that checks consistency of depends/select for packages. Maybe it can be integrated to the current check-package.

Testing infrastructure

• Fix run-tests to use a config file for download and output directories, can be overridden in the environment
• Documentation on how to add a test, including naming convention

TODO items under discussion

Here are some nice-to-have's for which it is not entirely clear if and how they could be implemented:

• Out-of-tree builds, which allows the package source to be shared between different output directories and between host and target compiles.
• It would be nice if you could run a buildroot command that prepares a local copy of a package's source, and allows you to generate patches for it later. This could use git or quilt to keep track of the patches.
• It would be nice if there was a make target to reinstall everything to the target (i.e. remove all the target-installed stamps, remove the root stamp, maybe remove the target too). However, what is missing is the copying of the toolchain support files (libc.so etc.). It's not obvious that this can be done in a reliable way.
• To facilitate debugging, all packages should be installed to the staging directory. The target directory should in fact be a subset of the staging directory. See the FOSDEM 2013 discussion at http://elinux.org/Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2013, and the discussion around patch http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/252718/. This is however a significant change in Buildroot, so probably difficult to implement, and will raise a number of quite complicated questions.