Difference between revisions of "Buildroot"

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(Core Buildroot infrastructure)
(Nice to have)
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Upcoming:
 
Upcoming:
* [[Buildroot:RegularVirtualMeeting | Regular virtual meeting]], starting September 2020
+
* [[Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2023 | Buildroot Developer Days]], 6-8 February 2023, Brussels, Belgium, after [https://fosdem.org/2023/ FOSDEM]
  
 
Past:
 
Past:
 +
* [[Buildroot:DeveloperDaysELCE2022 | Buildroot Developer Days]], 17-18 September 2022, Dublin, Ireland, after [https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-europe/about/embedded-linux-conference/ ELCE]
 
* [[Buildroot:VirtualDeveloperDaysSummer2020 | Virtual Buildroot Developer Days]], July 27, August 28, August 29, 2020
 
* [[Buildroot:VirtualDeveloperDaysSummer2020 | Virtual Buildroot Developer Days]], July 27, August 28, August 29, 2020
 
* [[Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2020 | Buildroot Developer Days]], 3-5 February 2020, Brussels, Belgium, after [http://fosdem.org FOSDEM]
 
* [[Buildroot:DeveloperDaysFOSDEM2020 | Buildroot Developer Days]], 3-5 February 2020, Brussels, Belgium, after [http://fosdem.org FOSDEM]
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==== Important ====
 
==== Important ====
  
 +
* Instead of building the Go compiler, add support for using a pre-compiled Go compiler, like we do for Rust
 +
* Instead of building host-nodejs, add support for using a pre-compiled NodeJS for the host
 
* Improve the imx-gpu-viv package to not install everything. See https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/20210805233615.4e69d63d@windsurf/T/#u
 
* Improve the imx-gpu-viv package to not install everything. See https://lore.kernel.org/buildroot/20210805233615.4e69d63d@windsurf/T/#u
  
 
==== Nice to have ====
 
==== Nice to have ====
  
 +
* Extend support/scripts/setlocalversion to include the git/hg version(s) of BR2_EXTERNAL.
 
* Create a package for the Qt5 demo/benchmark application at https://github.com/prabindh/xgxperf.
 
* Create a package for the Qt5 demo/benchmark application at https://github.com/prabindh/xgxperf.
 
* Packages proposed in bug reports (often with patch)
 
* Packages proposed in bug reports (often with patch)
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=== Documentation ===
 
=== Documentation ===
  
 +
* Convert the documentation + the generation workflow from current asciidoc to either markdown or ReStructuredText (people are nowadays more used to that syntax, and they are formatted directly when viewed in gitlab/github).
 
* [[Buildroot how to contribute | Document how to contribute]] (how often to repost, what to expect, ...) [[Buildroot how to contribute | basic guide]]  
 
* [[Buildroot how to contribute | Document how to contribute]] (how often to repost, what to expect, ...) [[Buildroot how to contribute | basic guide]]  
 
* Document that package patches should be sent upstream
 
* Document that package patches should be sent upstream

Revision as of 02:53, 19 January 2023

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

Important links

Developer days

Upcoming:

Past:

Talks

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

Past:

List of forks

  • Home Assistant Operating System. Home Assistant Operating System (formerly HassOS) is an operating system optimized for hosting Home Assistant and its Add-ons.
  • OpenIL. OpenIL is an open source project based on Buildroot and designed for embedded industrial solution.
  • Bsquask SDK. A Rasberry-Pi related 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.

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

Nice to have

Toolchain

Documentation

  • Convert the documentation + the generation workflow from current asciidoc to either markdown or ReStructuredText (people are nowadays more used to that syntax, and they are formatted directly when viewed in gitlab/github).
  • Document how to contribute (how often to repost, what to expect, ...) basic guide
  • Document that package patches should be sent upstream

Core Buildroot infrastructure

  • Cargo and Go post-process handling for vendoring
    • Add support for tarball formats other than gz
  • 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.
  • 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.