0001025: New User Questions - BusyBox Bug and Patch Tracking

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Category

Severity

Reproducibility

Date Submitted

Last Update

0001025

[buildroot] Documentation

feature

N/A

09-08-06 15:29

02-12-07 05:44

Reporter

mboutte

View Status

public

Assigned To

buildroot

Priority

normal

Resolution

suspended

Status

closed

Product Version

Summary

0001025: New User Questions

Description

Hi - I am very new to buildroot, and first I want to say that it seems to be exactly what I need and also incredibly sophisticated. Thank you and all of your associates for this massive work effort.

The sophistication is where my problems arise, plus very little documentation that I can find. So I have a few questions that I think could help others if they were part of a FAQ. Let me try to explain why I want to use buildroot first, but I won't bore you with too many details.

I designed and built a board based on the powerpc MPC8xx series of Freescale processors. It has a few unique ports designed for my use.

I discovered and successfully adapted first U-Boot and then the ELDK from Denx to customize a bootloader and Linux 2.6 to run on this board. It originally used the ELDK "self" which is a small glibc based root filesystem. The filesystem quickly became too big to run, even in the 16M flash and 32M RAM on my board.

A friend created a new rootfilesystem based on uClibc and busybox on an older MAC that uses the powerpc, so that he was working natively. He attempted to build a cross compiler for the filesystem on a PC but was unsuccessful. This root filesystem works fine as far as it goes, but now I want to compile new programs and update the old ones and I no longer have access to this MAC. So I started working with your buildroot system on an X86 (actually AMD64) running Linux Fedora Core.

So far I seem to be flailing around and barely getting anywhere. A few false starts have shown me that I absolutely have to simply "make" without changing anything in the default config except targetting to my powerpc target processor. Then I can successfully build a larger system. So here are my questions:

1. How do I go about making a cross compiler for the existing root filesystem which is 0.9.27? I see no way to do that because the svn access always seems to go for the latest (0.9.28-29) unless I call out a specific build, which is still not tied to a version though. I find the older compressed versions but do not know how to use those with the buildroot that I have already managed to create.

2. How do I determine what Toolchain Options to use for Kernel Headers, Binutils version and GCC compiler version? Is there some correlation to the versions of these items used to cross compile the kernel?

3. How do I start building a fresh rootfilesystem? The "make clean" and "make distclean" seem to leave an awful lot behind? On the same lines how do I remove something from the root filesystem? For example I tried including Python and the resulting root was huge, but removing it from the configuration does not remove it from the root - and understanably, as I would expect to be able to put my own applications into the filesystem and not have them wiped out by rebuilding. So far I have simply created two directories to play in - one named uclibc and the other uclibc-0.9.27, the latter where I have been attempting to get a 0.9.27 version going. each has its own separate buildroot under it to work in.

4. The configuration "endian-ness" seems to track the target processor, except that the JFFS2 file system option has an endian configuration selection. If my powerpc is big-endian should I make this big-endian?

5. Is there somewhere else that might have more information in the way of faqs, documentation or case studies? I would be happy to write up anything that I discover for use by others. How about a Wiki based documentation system that users could add to?

I read somewhere that almost 50% of new embedded designs were abandoned because of hardware/software complexity!

Thank you in advance for your help.
Mike Boutte

Additional Information

I made this private because most of the traffic seems to be real bug elimination work, but you can make it public if you think it will help anyone. Is there another site for just questions?

Attached Files

Relationships

Notes
(0001629) vapier 09-09-06 15:15	the bug tracker isnt for such things; please send an e-mail to the mailing lists

Issue History
Date Modified	Username	Field	Change
09-08-06 15:29	mboutte	New Issue
09-08-06 15:29	mboutte	Status	new => assigned
09-08-06 15:29	mboutte	Assigned To	=> uClibc
09-09-06 15:15	vapier	Note Added: 0001629
09-09-06 15:15	vapier	Status	assigned => closed
09-09-06 15:15	vapier	Resolution	open => suspended
09-09-06 15:15	vapier	View Status	private => public
02-12-07 05:44	vapier	Status	closed => assigned
02-12-07 05:44	vapier	Assigned To	uClibc => buildroot