Buildroot 2010.02 released, contributions from Free
Electrons!
Posted by Thomas
Petazzoni on March 2nd, 2010 (rss, trackback)
Tags: buildroot,
contribution,
development
Buildroot
is a embedded Linux system build system. It automates the process of
downloading, configuring, compiling and installating all the components
of an embedded Linux system, from Busybox to more complicated software
stacks using Gtk, Qt, X.org, Gstreamer, etc. Buildroot is easy to use
and extend, making it a nice choice for small to medium-sized embedded
Linux systems.
As promised by the fixed-release schedule, a 2010.02 release has
been published on Friday, with numerous improvements over the previous
version 2009.11, many of which are part of the general cleanup process
that the project is doing since the beginning of 2009. These
improvements are detailed in the project
CHANGES file.
Thomas Petazzoni, from Free Electrons, implemented several of these
improvements :
- Creation of a package
infrastructure for non-autotools packages. Buildroot had for a long
time an infrastructure
to factorize the code needed to build packages based on the autotools
build systems. But all other packages were using hand-made Makefiles,
which were hard to write and generated a lot of code duplication.
Therefore, we have introduced an infrastructure that makes adding new
packages much easier, and which allows us to cleanup the existing
codebase significantly by factorizing a lot of common code. The
autotools infrastructure has also been reworked on top of the generic
infrastructure to avoid code duplication as well. At the same time, we
have significantly improved the documentation
on how to add new packages.
This infrastructure is a building block that will allow us to easily
add more features to all packages in Buildroot (such as package
generation).
- Removal of the external toolchain source mechanism, which
was merged with the normal toolchain building procedure. This special
casing was implemented to allow the compilation of AVR32 toolchains,
but such an additional complexity wasn’t needed. Now, Buildroot
continues to build AVR32 toolchains as it used to do, but the code is
much cleaner. Another illustration of our large cleanup effort.
- Many, many, many fixes to different packages, many of them to
ensure that we do not depend on development packages being installed on
the host. This is very important to ensure that our build procedure is
as independent as possible from the development machine configuration.
From the list of contributors, ordered by the number of patches,
Thomas Petazzoni of Free Electrons has been the first Buildroot
contributor for this last release :
$ git shortlog -e -n -s 2009.11..2010.02
139 Thomas Petazzoni <[email protected]>
124 Peter Korsgaard <[email protected]>
26 Lionel Landwerlin <[email protected]>
23 Gustavo Zacarias <[email protected]>
7 Julien Boibessot <[email protected]>
4 Nigel Kukard <[email protected]>
4 Sven Neumann <[email protected]>
2 Anders Darander <[email protected]>
2 Chris Packham <[email protected]>
2 Daniel Mack <[email protected]>
2 H Hartley Sweeten <[email protected]>
2 Richard van Paasen <[email protected]>
2 Will Wagner <[email protected]>
2 William Wagner <[email protected]>
2 Yann E. MORIN <[email protected]>
1 Cameron Hutchison <[email protected]>
1 Clark Rawlins <[email protected]>
1 Francisco Gonzalez <[email protected]>
1 Francisco Gonzalez Morell <[email protected]>
1 Hans-Christian Egtvedt <[email protected]>
1 Lionel Landwerlin <[email protected]>
1 Ormund Williams <[email protected]>
1 Rob Alley <[email protected]>
1 Sagaert Johan <[email protected]>
1 grante <gra...@alpha.(none)>
For the next release, we will work on additional cleanup of
Buildroot and particularly the target/
directory, which contains the code to build the Linux kernel, different
bootloaders, and to generate the final root filesystem image in various
formats. Improving support for external toolchains is also on our TODO
list : supporting multilib toolchains such as the CodeSoucery
toolchain, and fixing a long-standing issue with libtool.
Don’t hesitate to try Buildroot,
and to report your successes and failures on the mailing-list,
in our bug tracker, or on our
IRC channel, #uclibc on Freenode.
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