What is Firmware Linux?

Firmware Linux is an embedded Linux build system, designed to reduce or even eliminate the need for cross compiling.

The build system is a series of bash scripts which create a small native Linux development environment for each target, runnable on real hardware or under emulators such as QEMU.

Currently supported targets include arm, mips, powerpc, x86, and x86-64. Partial support is available for sparc, sh4, and m68k.

For more information, see the documentation page.

Downloading Firmware Linux

Source Code

The Firmware Linux source code is a series of shell scripts which run to create the various binary images. See the README for usage instructions, and the release notes.

Several prebuilt binary images are available, based on the current Firmware Linux release. The README describes each tarball. The release notes on the news page explain recent changes.

Development

The project maintains a development repository using the Mercurial source control system. This includes RSS feeds for each checkin and for new releases.

Questions about Firmware Linux should be addressed to the project's mailing list, or the IRC channel #firmware on irc.freenode.org. The project maintainer's blog often includes notes about ongoing Firmware Linux development.