Mercurial > hg > aboriginal
view www/news.html @ 987:b6d7a815e47a
Don't need to blank STAGE_DIR when read_arch_dir already does.
author | Rob Landley <rob@landley.net> |
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date | Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:17:43 -0600 |
parents | 9d5a42a83de2 |
children | f99d25daec6a |
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<!--#include file="header.html" --> <b><h1>News</h1></b> <h2><a name="02-02-2010" />February 2, 2010</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.10.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.10</a> is out, based on <a href=http://impactlinux.com/hg/firmware/shortlog/966>hg commit 966</a>.</p> <p>Yeah, I know 1.0 is overdue for a release, here's a resync point with the 2.6.32 kernel and uClibc 0.9.30.2.</p> <p>There are some regressions this time around, which I plan to fix up in the next release. The 2.6.32 kernel broke strace, and upgrading to the new version didn't fix it. (I know how, I just haven't yet.) The m68k and armv6l targets aren't currently building due to the uClibc upgrade (yeah, "bugfix only", I know). I screwed up the screenshots page (which is halfway converted to Vladimir's new fancy version with style sheets, but "halfway" doesn't actually display right). The cron job building nightly snapshots got taken down when the server's hard drive filled up, and now it's in the process of being upgraded with a couple new scripts:</p> <p>The new sources/more/migrate_kernel.sh script does a "make oldconfig" between the stable and "USE_UNSTABLE=linux" kernels, and creates a new alt-miniconfig-linux for the specified target with any new symbols that showed up. (This means the snapshots should break less, but adding the symbols to the native configs will still require manual filtering.)</p> <p>Also, the new sources/more/bisectinate.sh script automatically does a git bisect between a known good and known bad (generally HEAD) version of one of the unstable packages (linux, uClibc, or busybox). It can test that the build completes, or that the system image boots and successfully builds the static native dropbear binary. (In theory this will allow the nightly snapshots to automaticaly isolate and report the first commit that broke them.)</p> <p>In other general infrastructure news: some extensive upgrades to the compiler wrapper (ccwrap), such as no longer needing GIMME_AN_S at compile time and instead autodetecting the presence of libgcc_s.so vs libgcc.a and behaving appropriately. A largeish cleanup/refactoring of the compiler build (described in <a href=http://impactlinux.com/hg/firmware/shortlog/944>commit 944</a>) added a new "native-compiler.sh" script, which handles building the improved "cross-compiler" tarball that includes thread support and uClibc++ and is statically linked against uClibc on the host. The simple cross compiler is now "simple-cross-compiler.sh" (which is good enough to build a system image, but isn't very useful in other contexts).</p> <p>The host-tools.sh stage now only builds e2fsprogs or squashfs if the build is actually going to use them (based on the SYSIMAGE_TYPE config symbol). The sources/sections scripts now come in two flavors: an *.build version with setup/cleanup called automatically and *.sh files which do their own setup/cleanup within the script. Each system image's run-emulator.sh will once again add /sbin:/usr/sbin to the $PATH if it can't find mke2fs.</p> <p>The --extract command line option went away from download.sh because everything else works via environment variables. Use EXTRACT_ALL=1 instead.</p> <p>Fixed a few regressions that snuck into previous versions: the config-{linux,uClibc,busybox} should once again be in the root filesystem's usr/src directory, buildall.sh should now try to build the static native dropbear/strace binaries for all targets (not just the last one) and it should properly be running smoketest.sh again.</p> <h2><a name="12-08-2009" />December 8, 2009</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.9.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.9</a> is out, based on <a href=http://impactlinux.com/hg/firmware/shortlog/921>hg commit 921</a>.</p> <p>Just a checkpoint on the way to 1.0, which is still planned for around new years, but there's been some schedule slippage already.</p> <ul> <li> <p><b>New documentation</b></p> <p>The presentation slides have been converted to <a href=presentation.html>HTML</a>, although the much prettier (and much bigger) <a href=downloads/presentation.pdf>PDF</a> is still available.</p> <p>There is also a <a href=FAQ.html>FAQ</a>, which is still somewhat sparse. (Ask away.)</p> </li> <li><p><b>Prebuilt binaries</b></p></li> <p>Added shm support to uClibc. Bugfix to the c++ compiler (it should work again). The system images now have a "guest" user/group so packages can more easily be built as a non-root user. The shell prompt now includes the $HOST name.</p> </li> <li><p><b>Build scripts</b></p> <p>A new trivial-but-convenient "./clean.sh" script lets you delete just the target builds out of "build". (If you delete that whole directory it has to re-extract all the package tarballs and rebuilt the host tools, which is often unnecessary work.)</p> <p>Command recording has been completely redone. No more RECORD_COMMANDS variable, instead run sources/more/record-commands.sh to wrap the current $PATH in build/wrappy (either after or instead of running host-tools.sh), then run your build stages, and finally either run sources/more/report-recorded-commands.sh to get a summary or look at the raw command line lists in build/logs.</p> <p>The Great Refactoring continues in sources/sections: broke up binutils-gcc.sh into individual binutils, gcc, and ccwrap stages, split off linux-headers and uClibc++ from uClibc.sh, and spun off toybox.sh from busybox.sh.</p> <p>Also broke kernel_cmdline() out of qemu_defaults() to make it easier to add non-qemu sources/targets configurations without reinventing the wheel, and fixed up dependencies for hw-target builds (which should work a lot more reliably now).</p> <p>Bumped up the number of $CPUS used by the build to 1.5x the actual number (as long as your host has at least 512 megs of ram per actual CPU). That should help keep larger servers busy.</p> <p>Some self-hosting fixes from Natanael Copa (making sure host-tools.sh builds on a uClibc host): added --disable-nls to the e2fsprogs build (what exactly is ./configure running all these tests for again?), and a squashfs patch (substituting a function uClibc hasn't got).</p> <p>Simplified system-image.sh to use killtree() instead of mysetsid. Simplified the cross-compiler/cross-static logic to set the $PATH to use the right one, rather than moving them around during the build. Updated smoketest-all.sh to show "NONE" for system images that didn't build. Added more support for SKIP_STRIP and CFLAGS=-g to the rest of the packages. Cleaned out the old USE_COLOR stuff which was superceded by set_titlebar.</p> </li> </ul> <hr> <h2><a name=11-07-2009 />November 7, 2009</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.8.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.8</a> is out, based on hg commit 876. (If you want to see all the changes in this release, look at <a href=http://impactlinux.com/hg/firmware/shortlog/876>commits 810 through 876</a>.)</p> <p.The current plan is to cut one more release at the end of the month, and then have the 1.0 release around new year's. This could be considered a 1.0-pre1, if you like.</p> <p>This release upgrades linux to 2.6.31.4 and busybox to 1.15.2. (The uClibc version is still 0.9.30.1, they haven't had a new release yet.)</p> <p>The old #firmware irc channel on freenode.net has been merged into #edev, so go there now to ask questions about this project. (A _lot_ of knowledgeable, helpful people hang there who can answer your embedded development questions.)</p> <h3><b>Bug tracker and roadmap</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The <a href=http://redmine.impactlinux.com/projects/impact>new bug tracker</a> has a <a href=http://redmine.impactlinux.com/projects/impact/roadmap>roadmap</a> showing what we plan to implement for the next release or two.</p> <p>It's also a place to file bugs, athough sending them to the <a href=http://lists.impactlinux.com/listinfo.cgi/firmware-impactlinux.com>mailing list</a> is still the fastest way to get a fix.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>New screenshots page</b></h3> <blockquote> <p><a href=screenshots>This page</a> lists every target, with a "screenshot" of the target's boot messages under qemu, and associated links to all the various prebuilt binaries for that target.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Fun with static linking</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The cross-compiler-$ARCH tarballs are all compiled for i686 and statically linked against uClibc for maximum portability.</p> <p>The busybox binary in the root filesystem images is now built statically by default, providing a 20% speed improvement in ./configure times under qemu (due to the reduced page translation overhead). You can switch this back to dynamic with "BUILD_STATIC=none".</p> <p>Static dropbear and strace binaries for each target are also available, built by the new sources/more/native-static-build.sh script.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>System Image interface changes</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The run-from-build.sh script used to set up a development environment out of the build directory, but didn't provide an easy way to do so based on downloaded tarballs. (You had to work out and provide extensive command line arguments to the run-emulator.sh script.) This has been fixed.</p> <p>The run-emulator.sh script in each system interface tarball is now much simpler. It now looks for distccd and $ARCH-cc in its $PATH, and sets up distcc acceleration automatically if it finds them. (It announces whether or not it has managed to do so, and init.sh announces whether or not it thinks it has distcc acceleration enabled just before launching a command prompt.) So setting up the distcc accelerator should be less of a pain.</p> <p>Also, run-emulator.sh no longer takes any command line arguments. Instead the environment variable $HDB indicates a /dev/hdb disk image to mount on /home, $HDBMEGS specifies the size of a (sparse ext2) HDB image to create if it doesn't already exist, and QEMU_MEMORY indicates how many megabytes of physical memory the emulator should allocate for the virtual system.</p> <p>Each system-image also provides a simple wrapper dev-environment.sh which calls run-emulator.sh with HDBMEGS=2048, HDB=hdb.img, and QEMU_MEMORY=256. (These are the values run-from-build.sh used to provide, and give a reasonable build environment with 256 megs of physical memory and 2 gigabytes of writeable /home space.) The run-from-build.sh script itself now merely adds the specified build/cross-compiler-$ARCH directory to the $PATH, changes directory to the appropriate build/system-image-$ARCH, and calls ./dev-environment.sh. It's 3 lines.</p> <p>The system images can now also automatically mount a third disk image ($HDC, specifying an /dev/hdc image to mount onto the /mnt directory), and if that filesystem contains an executable "init" program in its root directory the sbin/init.sh script will run that instead of launching a command prompt.</p> <p>The new native-static-build.sh uses this HDC capability to automatically run some native package builds without having to drive the build through /dev/console via a wrapper script (the way smoketest.sh does). See sources/more/setup-native-static-build.sh for the script which generates the hdc.sqf image for this.</p> <p>Note that some targets (such as sh4 and powerpc) don't yet support /dev/hdc due to QEMU board emulation limitations.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Build interface changes</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The new "sources/more" directory contains scripts the end user can call, but which aren't important enough to clutter up the top level directory with. The buildall.sh and smoketest-all.sh scripts moved there, as did the cronjob.sh used to build the nightly snapshots.</p> <p>The new sources/more/native-static-build.sh natively compiles dropbear and strace under the emulator, and copies them out to the host through the virtual network (into the build/cron-temp directory) using busybox ftpd on the host. This provides an example of how to use the new HDC /mnt/init functionality to perform automatic builds under the emulator, and copy the results out through the network. It uses the new sources/timeout.sh wrapper to detect hung builds (defined as builds that haven't produced a line of output within a given number of seconds).</p> <p>The new BINARY_PACKAGE_TARBALLS variable (in the file "config") tells the build to create a separate tarball of the binaries produced building each package. (These more granular tarballs aren't shipped yet, but may be in a future release.)</p> <p>The new SKIP_STRIP variable tells the build not to strip binaries. (Add in CFLAGS=-g for enormous binaries full of debug info.)</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Target upgrades</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>Powerpc and sh4 should now work fine with stock qemu 0.11.0.</p> <p>The arm platform now has an armv4tl target. This is a little-endian armv4 eabi, for armv4 chips offering the "thumb" extension which eabi requires. (The plain armv4l target is still oabi. The oabi/eabi thing is different binary ABIs, a bit like Linux vs BSD binaries or aout vs elf. The eabi standard is the new one, but some of the older arm hardware can't support it. This takes it down as far as it can go.)</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Infrastructure</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>Behind the scenes, some extensive work is going on to simplify the build scripts. (The documentation's fallen a bit behind reality here, but should be back up to date next release.)</p> <p>The uClibc miniconfigs are now automatically generated, with the bulk of the config living in sources/baseconfig-uClibc and the few target specific lines being appended from the UCLIBC_CONFIG variable defined in the target's settings file.</p> <p>The other big change is factoring out lots of common code, moving it into the sources/sections directory, so things like the uClibc, busybox, and toolchain builds now live in one place and are called from the various other scripts that need them. (This may eventually allow alternate build scripts for these packages, potentially swapping out glibc for uClibc, or llvm/clang for gcc. In the meantime, it eliminates a lot of redundant code.)</p> <p>This required lots of small cleanups, such as making the scripts now consistently use the $STAGE_DIR variable for their output directory. Some other cleanups were primarily cosmetic, such as moving the extracted tarball cache directory from build/sources to build/packages. (Tarballs live in packages, extracted tarballs live in build/packages.)</p> <p>The root filesystem now contains simple /etc/passwd and /etc/group files, because dropbear won't work without them (not even to ssh out).</p> <p>Several small bugfixes (ccwrap no longer segfaults if $PATH isn't exported, /etc/resolv.conf doesn't get overwritten unnecessarily by init.sh, etc).</p> </blockquote> <hr> <h2><a name=08-20-2009 />August 20, 2009</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.7.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.7</a> is out, a little over a month and a half late. It's a larger update than usual, so the release notes are a bit long.</p> <p>This release is based on <a href=http://impactlinux.com/hg/firmware/log/807>mercurial version 807</a> of the build scripts, and includes <b>Linux 2.6.30.4</b> and <b>BusyBox 1.14.3</b>. No new uClibc release is out since last time.</p> <p>Lots of little bugs got fixed. For example, this release should build on Fedora 11 (and any other platform that hasn't got "which" installed by default), and now supports distcc and ccache on the host (and will use them automatically if they are installed).</p> <h3><b>Changes to build stages: new root-filesystem, cross-static, and native-compiler tarballs, upgraded buildall.sh and smoketest-all.sh.</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The old "mini-native" stage has been renamed "root-filesystem" (the same way package-mini-native became system-image last release). The script names (and resulting tarballs) now indicate what each stage makes. So build.sh calls host-tools.sh, cross-compiler.sh, root-filesystem.sh, and system-image.sh, in that order.</p> <p>The old build-static-toolchains.sh script is gone, with its functionality integrated into buildall.sh (which now builds i686 hosted static toolchains for each target by default). This is implemented by two new environment variables triggering optional behavior: STATIC_CROSS_COMPILER_HOST and BUILD_STATIC_NATIVE_COMPILER.</p> <p>Setting STATIC_CROSS_COMPILER_HOST to an architecture name creates a cross compiler statically linked to run on that host (via a technique known as canadian cross compile). For example, the invocation:</p> <blockquote> <p>BUILD_CROSS_COMPILER_HOST=i686 ./build.sh armv4l</P> </blockquote> <p>Would create a tarball called "cross-static-armv4l.tar.bz2" which was built to run on an i686 host, and was statically linked (against uClibc) on that host to be distribution independent.</p> <p>Setting BUILD_STATIC_NATIVE_COMPILER to any non-empty value creates a native compiler for the target (packaged as native-compiler-$ARCH.tar.bz2), which is statically linked against uClibc so it can be extracted and run on just about any system of the appropriate type. (So if you can get a Linux shell prompt and have enough storage and memory, you should be able to compile stuff.)</p> <p>The upgraded smoketest-all.sh script runs smoketest.sh on each target built. (The smoketest.sh script attempts to compile and run "hello world" natively within a system image under qemu, and indicates whether or not it worked via "pass" or "fail".) Note that smoketest-all.sh now autodetects which targets have been built (have system images in the build directory), and smoketest.sh times out after 60 seconds so targets that hang will return failure eventually.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Squashfs 4.0 now the default system image type</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The root filesystem image type is now squashfs by default. (To change it set SYSIMAGE_TYPE to ext2 or initramfs, either in your environment or the file "configure".)</p> <p>This involved upgrading the userspace squashfs support package to the version 4.0 supported by the upstream kernel, and numerous small fixes to work with a read-only root filesystem (with writeable spaced mounted on /home and /tmp).</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Target upgrades</b></h3> <blockquote> <h3><b>ARM upgrades</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>Lots of work on the arm targets, with the addition of a new armv6l target and conversion of the armv5l target to <a href=http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/Linux-For-Devices-Articles/Why-ARMs-EABI-matters/>ARM EABI</a> (which used to be documented <a href=http://www.arm.com/products/DevTools/ABI.html>here</a>, but ARM screwed up its website and now you have to go <a href=http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.subset.swdev.abi/index.html>here</a>). The armv4l target still provides an ARM v4 little endian soft float OABI target (which is "the i386 of ARM", meaning it should run on just about any arm hardware, if a bit slowly). A new armv4be target is the same as armv4l except big endian.</p> <p>A new hw-tct-hammer target supports the <a href=http://www.tincantools.com/product.php?productid=16143>Tin Can Tools hammer/nail board</a>.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Updated sparc support, almost works now. (uClibc for sparc still sucks.)</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The sparc target has also been upgraded to the point where it now gives a shell prompt. (And immediately dies with a bus error or a hang if you try to do anything, because uClibc for sparc still doesn't work. The "upgrade" consisted of statically linking everything because uClibc's dynamic loader doesn't work for sparc.)</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>PowerPC remains fiddly due to QEMU issues, new powerpc-440fp target</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>PowerPC support in QEMU is <a href=http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-07/msg01007.html>officially unstable</a>, so although FWL's powerpc target hasn't significantly changed from last release, the version of QEMU in source control no longer runs it (nor the binary powerpc system images released with FWL 0.9.6) and QEMU's developers do not consider this a regression. While we search for a new Linux kernel .config that matches QEMU's current expectations (and await a release considered "stable"), note that setting HOST_BUILD_EXTRA=1 before running host-tools.sh will build a version of qemu that does run powerpc and put it in build/host where run-from-build.sh can find it. (Note also that building qemu from source still takes significantly longer than the rest of the host-tools.sh stage combined.)</p> <p>A new powerpc-440fp target produces code for the powerpc 440 with hardware floating point. (Theoretically QEMU's "bamboo" board emulation should run this, but QEMU doesn't emulate a 440 processor yet. We compromise by running a ppc440 filesystem under qemu's power mac emulation, to take advantage of the ppc440 instruction set being almost a subset of full powerpc. This gets us a shell prompt, but throws illegal instruction errors if you try to do anything fancy.)</p> <p>(Note that powerpc-440fp is not a hw-target for powerpc, it's a different processor instruction set like i586 vs i686. Alas, one that qemu doesn't properly emulate yet.)</p> </blockquote> </blockquote> <h3><b>Now using last GPLv2 release of GCC, and future plans</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>The upgrade to <b>gcc 4.2.1</b> gives us <a href=http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-announce/2007/msg00003.html>the last GPLv2 licensed version of gcc</a> (thus avoiding <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/343608/>various problems</a>). <a href=http://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4932>Make 3.81</a> was already the last GPLv2 release of that project.</p> <p>Note that <b>bash 2.05b</b> is still intentionally ancient (to avoid the bloat of 3.x), and may be replaced with busybox ash as the default FWL shell in a future release. Similarly, although <b>binutils 2.17</b> was the last GPLv2 version from the FSF, an upgrade to <a href=http://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/devel/binutils/release.binutils-2.18.50.0.1>the last GPLv2 release of Red Hat's binutils fork, 2.17.5.0.17</a> is under consideration for a future release. But mostly the GNU compiler toolchain has been upgraded as far as possible for the forseeable future, either because new versions provide no significant benefits or because they're not available under a license compatible with the Linux kernel's.</p> <p>Future upgrades to these packages will either be via individual patches (maintaining GPLv2 license) or by investigating alternative non-FSF packages such as OpenBSD's <a href=http://lwn.net/Articles/255558>PCC</a> or Apple's <a href=http://llvm.org>LLVM</a>. In preparation for support of alternate compilers, the build scripts have moved from using "gcc" to the more generic "cc" for the compiler name wherever possible, but currently no drop-in replacement compiler is available.</p> </blockquote> <h3><b>Implementation details</b></h3> <blockquote> <p>Each target configuration renamed "details" to "settings", and added a "description". (This makes Gentoo From Scratch's kconfig easier.)</p> <p>The download.sh stage now populates a "packages" directory instead of "sources/packages", meaning that everything in the sources directory now comes from the FWL source tarball. To do the equivalent of "make clean" you can "rm -rf build", and to do a "make distclean" you can "rm -rf packages build".</p> <p>The build no longer deletes the alt-* tarballs when UNSTABLE isn't set, you must do that by hand if you want an updated alt- version of a package. The packages/MANIFEST file creation can now use the extended tarball information to detect git version numbers.</p> <p>The === bars now show the current stage name and architecture each package is being built for. (Pipe the build output to grep "^===" to see just the start of each new package build.) The same information is sent to the title bar of your xterm, export NO_TITLE_BAR=1 if you don't want the build to update the title bar.</p> <p>The BUILD_STATIC option now applies to all packages built in root-filesystem.sh, and can be set from a target configuration's settings file (as sparc is now doing).</p> <p>The BUILD_VERBOSE option passes V=1 to the linux, busybox, and uClibc builds that otherwise sanitize their output.</p> <p>You can now set NATIVE_TOOLCHAIN=only to build just the compiler and not the other parts (busybox, make, toybox, bash...) This is used by the canadian cross steps in build.sh to create static cross and native compilers.</p> <p>This release broke up scripts/include.sh so that script just sets lots of environment variables, and now includes scripts/functions.sh to define shell functions. The architecture setup (reading architecture files and creating temporary directories and such) is now done via the "read_arch_dir $ARCH" shell function, so merely including sources/include.sh should no longer have significant side effects. Similarly, setupfor now has an EXTRACT_ONLY environment variable instead of depending on a blank $ARCH (which host-tools.sh has, despite wanting to snapshot source so it can build stuff).</p> <p>Various fixes to make parallel builds work better. (So it neither leaves background processes running nor kills the parent shell and closes your xterm when you hit ctrl-c.) The new "killtree" shell function, which kills a process and all its children and grandchildren recursively with pgrep. We also build our own sources/toys/mysetsid.c program with the host compiler (because the normal command line "setsid" doesn't also do a tcsetpgrp on stdin so signal handling isn't forwarded to the new session). This should more reliably allow ctrl-c to exit smoketest.sh and system-image.sh and such, and let FORK=1 ./buildall.sh stop all its background processes when interrupted. (Note that smoketest-all.sh also honors FORK=1.)</p> <p>The logs from buildall.sh now live in build/logs.</p> <p>The new config option ROOT_NODIRS avoids creating the normal set of empty directories in the new root filesystem. (The old /tools support went away, but a BUILD_STATIC ROOT_NODIRS build can be extracted into /tools and used from there. Then either symlink "/lib" to "/tools/lib" or "export UCLIBC_DYNAMIC_LINKER=/tools/lib/ld-uClibc.so.0" to add more stuff to /tools natively.)</p> <p>The compiler wrapper (sources/toys/ccwrap.c) can now use architecture-specific WRAPPER_TOPDIR values. (I.E. armv4l-cc could "export armv4l_WRAPPER_TOPDIR=/path/to/directory".) This makes canadian cross compiles a lot easier.</p> </blockquote> <hr> <h2><a name=04-02-2009 />April 2, 2009</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.6.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.6</a> includes Linux 2.6.29 and uClibc 0.9.30.1, now with support for sh4 and upgraded powerpc support.</p> <p>The big news is the <a href=http://impactlinux.com/code/gfs/>Gentoo From Scratch</a> project, which extends a FWL system image into a Gentoo Stage 1 environment, building natively inside qemu.</p> <p>The <a href=documentation.html>documentation</a> has been extensively rewritten (but needs more). The source now contains a README and each image has a usr/src/MANIFEST file listing the packages it built from.</p> <p>The cross and native toolchains now include ldd, readelf, and ldconfig. Added support for hardware targets (an unfinished example of which is hw-wrt610n) that use the same cross compiler and system image as a qemu platform, but build/package a different kernel to boot on actual hardware.</p> <p>Several new build options:</p> <ul> <li><p><b>$SYSIMAGE_TYPE</b> defaults to "ext2" but can now produce and boot "initramfs" images as well. (And squashfs, but that doesn't work yet due to missing features in squashfs tools version 3.4.)</p></li> <li><p>Setting <b>$HOST_BUILD_EXTRA</b> compiles qemu 0.10.1 in host-tools.sh. You currently need to do this to run sh4 or powerpc, 0.10.1 has some bugs needing patches. Not on by default because it takes a _long_ time.</p></li> <li><p><b>$NO_CLEANUP</b> keeps source around after builds for debugging purposes.</p></li> <li><p><b>$SYSIMAGE_HDA_MEGS</b> lets you control the size of the ext2 system images.</p></li> <li><p><b>$SNAPSHOT_SYMLINK</b> lets the extracted source live on a different filesystem than the build happens on. (Once the updated squashfs userspace tools ship, build-static-toolchains.sh may be updated to use this.)</p></li> <li><p><b>$CROSS_SMOKE_TEST</b> use qemu application emulation to test run hello world program at the end of the cross compiler build stage.</p></li> <li><p><b>$SKIP_STAGE_TARBALLS</b> don't create tarballs of each stage, just populate the directories.</p></li> <li><p><b>$NATIVE_RETROFIT_CXX</b> retroactively add uClibc++ to the cross compiler tarball during the native build stage.</p></li> </ul> <p>The run-emulator.sh scripts of system images have several new options, do "./run-emulator.sh --help" for a list. Takes several environment variables such as $QEMU_EXTRA and $KERNEL_EXTRA. Root filesystems can now run in read only mode with "KERNEL_EXTRA=ro".</p> <p>Lots of build infrastructure upgrades. The build stages have been reorganized somewhat (most noticeably package-mini-native.sh is now called system-image.sh). The "sources/packages" directory has moved up a directory (to separate repository files from stuff downloaded at runtime). Upgrades to the cc wrapper and the USE_UNSTABLE infrastructure. Better stripping of the cross compilers and system images, so everything's a bit smaller. The mirror list now lives in download.sh. New buildall.sh is a wrapper around build.sh. New build-static-toolchains.sh builds them under qemu; set FORK=1 to build them in paralell just like buildall.sh. The ext2 system images are now built at a small size with genext2fs and then expanded with resize2fs (because genext2fs slows down exponentially as size increases; this means e2fsprogs is built in host-tools.sh now). Distcc has been upgraded, and should work more reliably now.</p> <p>Too many little bug fixes to list.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=12-16-2008 />December 16, 2008</h2> <p>The mailing list moved to firmware at impactlinux.com. The link in the nav bar on the left has changed, but the <a href=http://www2.them.com:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firmware>old archives</a> are still there for the moment.</p> </hr> <h2><a name=12-03-2008 />December 3, 2008</h2> <p>After several false starts (I.E. last minute bugs, yes I test this thing before shipping it), <a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.5.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.5</a> is out, inching towards a 1.0 release. Lots of new work this time.</p> <p>The biggest news is uClibc 0.9.30 and uClibc++ 0.2.2. The native toolchain now supports C++, hooked up to distcc and everything.</p> <p>The <a href=documentation.html>documentation</a> has been extensively rewritten. (There's always more to do, but most of it isn't horribly out of date anymore.)</p> <p>The packaging stage now uses genext2fs instead of User Mode Linux, so the most brittle part of the build has been removed. FWL can now fully rebuild itself under itself, all the way through the packaging stage.</p> <p>My personal website's getting a touch overwhelmed, so a higher bandwidth site is now available at <a href=http://impactlinux.com/fwl>impactlinux.com</a>. This should become the new primary website going forward.</p> <p>BusyBox has also been upgraded (to 1.13.0), and the new USE_UNSTABLE infrastructure allows test versions of any package to be downloaded and built without forking the build scripts, so future package upgrades can be dealt with as side projects without blocking other important work.</p> <p>The packaging stage now uses genext2fs instead of User Mode Linux, so the most brittle part of the build has been removed. FWL can now fully rebuild itself under itself, all the way through the packaging stage.</p> <p>The old forkbomb script has been replaced with sources/build-all-targets.sh. with an argument --fork to build all targets in parallel, and "--fork 3" to limit the parallelism. This script can run from a cron job, producing a "buildall" directory with tarballs, compressed logs, and a README file listing the version of each package. The environment variable USE_STATIC_HOST specifies an $ARCH to create statically linked cross compilers for. (The build will then try to use them for the later stages, and won't get far if you specify an arch that can't run on the host.)</p> <p>The include.sh script has been broken up, with a new sources/functions.sh containing shell functions (like download, setupfor, and cleanup) and a new "config" setting the user-editable environment variables that control the build. Several of these variables have been renamed and their number has grown. You can now specify the colors for each build stage using the variables at the end of config.</p> <p>Building mini-native in a Linux From Scratch style /tools directory is no longer the default. Instead set NATIVE_TOOLSDIR=1 if you want that kind of layout instead of a more conventional layout. (Similarly, NATIVE_TOOLCHAIN=1 now enables the native toolchain, but that variable defaults to enabled in config.)</p> <p>See the <a href=documentation.html>docs</a> for details.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=08-06-2008 />August 6, 2008</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.9.0.tar.bz2>Version 0.9.0</a> is out (<a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware/shortlog/378>changeset 378</a>) and can rebuild itself under itself. (The packaging step still requires User Mode Linux to create ext2 images, which only works on x86 and x86-64 hosts. The next release should replace that with something more portable.) The root filesystem is now based on BusyBox 1.11.1 (plus a few bug fixes).</p> <p>The prebuilt binary images have been moved into their own <a href=downloads/binaries>binaries</a> directory. The prebuilt binary <a href=downloads/binaries/cross-compiler>cross compilers</a> are statically linked against uClibc for better portability. Updated the <a href=downloads/README>README</a> to better describe the contents of the <a href=downloads/binaries/system-image>system-image tarballs</a>.</p> <p>The forkbomb.sh script can now take a number of parallel targets to launch, for example "./forkbomb.sh --fork 3". (The resulting display is kind of horrible but the out-$ARCH.txt files are still legible.) Leaving off the number still builds all targets in parallel, with the original display.</p> <p>The include.sh script was reorganized so that interesting environment variables the user might want to export for themselves are set near the top of the script. Currently this includes:</p> <ul> <li><p><b>BUILD_SHORT</b> - Makes the mini-native.sh stage skip building development tools. The resulting mini-native root filesystem contains uClibc and busybox, but nothing else. (Export "BUILD_SHORT=headers" to put back the toolchain headers for use by another compiler, such as tinycc.)</p> <li><p><b>BUILD_STATIC</b> - Tell cross-compiler.sh to create static binaries, for a more portable cross compiler toolchain. (If you want them linked against uClibc, build a mini-native for your host, chroot into it, and then rebuild under that.)</li> <li><p><b>PREFERRED_MIRROR</b> - Tell download.sh to fetch packages from a non-default location (falling back to the standard mirror list if it can't get one from there).</p></li> <li><p><b>RECORD_COMMANDS</b> - Record a list of all command lines used during each build stage log files named "cmdlines.$STAGE.$PACKAGE" under the build directory. Each file can be turned into a list of the command names used via "awk '{print $1}' build/cmdlines* | sort -u". The script sources/toys/report_recorded_commands.sh gives a report of all commands used by each package after a call to "RECORD_COMMANDS=1 ./forkbomb.sh". (This is an easy way to find out exactly what environmental dependencies a package needs to build, or at least what it uses out of $PATH).</p></li> </ul> <p>Updated documentation is in progress...</p> <hr> <h2><a name=06-06-2008 />June 6, 2008</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.4.0.tar.bz2>Version 0.4.0</a> is out (<a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware/shortlog/345>changeset 345</a>), with kernel 2.6.25.4 and the "distcc trick" working out of the box.</p> <p>The distcc trick accelerates a native build by calling out to the cross compiler. To use it, download the appropriate cross-compiler-$ARCH and system-image-$ARCH tarballs, run the "run-with-distcc.sh" from the system image directory with the path to the cross compiler directory as its first argument. (You need to have distcc installed on the host system.)</p> <p>After building from source, the cross-compiler and system-image directories remain in the build directory. The "emulator-build.sh" runs these with distcc acceration set up. The script "smoketest.sh" is a wrapper around emulator-build.sh which feeds a script into qemu's stdin to compile and run a multi-threaded "hello world" under the emulator, using distcc and the cross compiler.</p> <p>If smoketest.sh works for a platform, it means a lot of stuff worked to get that far. The cross compiler worked to build the system, and the emulated system booted so QEMU, the uClibc config, and the kernel config agreed. The emulated system has a working virtual hard drive and serial port, and for distcc to work it has a working virtual network connection. Running "make" would also require a working realtime clock.</p> <p>The seven commands missing in order to run the FWL build under itself are bzip2, sort, diff, wget, install, od, and find. (The busybox versions, where available, had a bug, and they're not in toybox yet.) I'm trying to get those in for the next release in September.</p> <p>Sorry I missed a release back in April. Shouldn't happen again.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=01-29-2008 />January 29, 2008</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.3.1.tar.bz2>Version 0.3.1</a> is out (<a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware/shortlog/275>changeset 275</a>), with kernel 2.6.24. The <a href=downloads/images>images</a> are now tarballs each containing the ext2, zImage, and run script files. The run scripts now run qemu-setup.sh by default so /proc, /sys, /dev and the virtual network are initialized, and the default shell is busybox ash (so cursor keys and history work).</p> <p>Sparc is still broken (tracked it down to a dynamic linking bug, I think, haven't fixed it yet) and m68k is failing to build with an internal compiler error (next release I should upgrade the compiler). All the other targets have a working virtual network, and all but powerpc exit qemu when you exit the PID 1 command shell.</p> <p>Building on an x86-64 host< should no longer be insanely slow (the gcc-min-heapsize arguments that allow 32-bit hosts to build in 128 megs of ram do very impolite things to 64-bit hosts), and the resulting x86-64 cross compiler should now be properly relocatable.</p> <p>Better build dependency tracking: the host-tools script is now populating a single directory with all the commands needed by the build, and restricting $PATH to that directory (so it can't accidentally call any commands that aren't explicitly listed). It's building toybox and busybox to provide most of these commands (the remaining ones are listed towards the end of include.sh), and creating symlinks to the remaining ones out of the original $PATH. This allows it to build on a wider range of host distributions.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=11-02-2007 />November 2, 2007</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.3.0.tar.bz2>Version 0.3.0</a> is out (changeset 242), with kernel 2.6.23. PowerPC finally works under qemu (network and everything), and it's building a m68k target (although I have no emulator to run that). That means there are ten targets, of which eight run under qemu. (Sparc is still broken, let me know if anybody actually cares.)</p> <p>The new "./forkbomb.sh --fork" script builds all the targets in parallel, or use --nofork if you haven't got the memory for that (and --watch to watch and existing build if you ctrl-c out of the display before it's done).</p> <p>The build is now smarter about extracting only one copy of the source code (in build/sources) and re-using it for multiple builds, building out of tree (via cp -rs to create a tree full of symlinks so the package doesn't need native out-of-tree support).</p> <hr> <h2><a name=09-02-2007 />September 2, 2007</h2> <p>Added <a href=new_platform.html>a porting guide</a>. I'm working on m68k, ppc, big endian arm, and maybe blackfin targets for the next release, and thought other people might be interested in the process. (The vast majority of it is fiddly debugging. These are the other steps.)</p> <hr> <h2><a name-06-27-2007 />June 27, 2007</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.2.2.tar.bz2>Version 0.2.2</a> is out (changeset 185). Using uClibc 0.9.29 release, several small bugfixes, new mips big-endian config, actually work when /bin/sh->dash (mostly by explicitly saying /bin/bash everywhere), automatically detect the number of CPUs in the machine to feed -j to make, and better diagnostic output.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=04-09-2007 />April 9, 2007</h2> <p><a href=downloads/firmware-0.2.1.tar.bz2>Version 0.2.1</a> is out (changeset 156). Significant upgrades to armv4l: the native compiler works now, and it's using soft-float. Added armv5l and i586 targets to show how to do that kind of variant. Added preliminary powerpc support (although qemu can't run it yet). Reorganized the download directory and rewrote the <a href=downloads/README>README</a>. Added squashfs back (the kernel supports it, but it's not using it yet). Moved uClibc to miniconfig. (Yes, the patch for this is huge, and yes I need to push it all upstream into the Linux kernel. On the bright side, this one builds on a host that doesn't have curses installed.) Stopped trying to build qemu (at least until they get the gcc 3.x dependencies cleaned out), now just warn if it's not there (so far the build only uses it to sanity-test the cross compiler, which is now skipped automatically if it's not there).</p> <p>I note that some versions of Ubuntu (Edgy and up) are pushing a political agenda. They install bash, but point /bin/sh to dash instead. (So why install bash if you're not going to use it?) This breaks all sorts of things, and if somebody can tell me how to force make to run "/bin/bash" instead of "/bin/sh", I'll consider trying to deal with the mess. Until then, I suggest "rm /bin/sh; ln -s bash /bin/sh" to get a working system. (I'm no fan of bash, but dash is just broken.)</p> <p>(Those of you who use vi and want to be able to use the cursor keys while in insert mode might want to do something similar with vi->vim. Ubuntu seems to be trying to train users to change their habits. Dog biscuits would be a more honest approach.)</p> <p>Update: I've been pointed at <a href=https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh>this</a> as evidence Ubuntu isn't pushing a political agenda. Ok, maybe it's just really bad technical judgement. Are they honestly saying that people write shell scripts for the speed? And how do you make a size argument and then install bash by default in ADDITION to the other shell? Boggle. In 1991 after Linus Torvalds taught his term program to understand the minix filesystem so he could upload and download without rebooting, he taught it to handle the system calls of bash so he could rm/mv/mkdir without rebooting. That's where Linux 0.0.1 came from. Bash was the default Linux shell _before_ 0.0.1. Be very careful messing with that kind of a de-facto standard, guys. Dash is garbage. Background a process with & and then hit ctrl-c: it'll kill it. It doesn't understand blah/{blah,blah} file list syntax. It can't do "source file.sh" (just ". file.sh", which is unreadable). I repeat: I'm not a fan of bash (yeah, the bloat's getting crazy), but dash is broken.</p> <p>And that still doesn't explain why "vi" can't use the cursor keys in insert mode, but "vim" can...</p> <hr> <h2><a name=03-06-2007 />March 6, 2007</h2> <p>Version 0.2.0 is out. This one builds ext2 images which can boot up to a shell prompt under qemu. This works on i686, armv4l, x86_64, and mipsel. (Sparc's broken. Anyone who cares about sparc is welcome to debug it.)</p> <p>There are now prebuilt ext2 image files in the download directory. The kernels are in the mini-native tarballs. (Yeah, I should repackage that next release.) The system emulator invocation for each platform is the appropriate sources/configs file, and run-mini-native.sh invokes 'em.</p> <p>The mailing list is in the usual place if you have any questions.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=01-14-2007 />January 14, 2007</h2> <p>There's a new irc channel for the project, #firmware on freenode.</p> <p><a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware?cl=88>Changeset 88</a> builds i686, x86_64, armv4l, mips, and sparc. I've made a release tarball of that (<a href=downloads/firmware-0.1.1.tar.bz2>firmware 0.1.1</a>, "It works for me"), and updated the prebuilt cross-compiler tarballs in the <a href=downloads>downloads</a> directory. I've added a big README and prebuilt mini-native tarballs for each platform (although packing them up into something qemu can boot is currently left as an exercise for the reader).</p> <p>Speaking of which, I'm currently working on adding ext2 packaging (via <a href=http://landley.net/code/toybox>toybox</a>) to the build scripts, so qemu system emulation can boot the result and then run the next stage automatically.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=12-28-2006 />December 28, 2006</h2> <p><a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware?cl=68>Changeset 68</a> builds a native build environment with a working toolchain. And in celebration, I've revamped the website with an actual navigation bar and content and such.</p> <p>I should put out a release soon.</p> <hr> <h2><a name=12-05-2006 />December 5, 2006</h2> <p><a href=http://landley.net/hg/firmware?cl=27>Changeset 27</a> builds a relocatable armv4l cross-compile toolchain! Download the tarball, run ./download.sh, then run ./build.sh, then grab the "build/cross-compiler" directory and use "bin/armv4l-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc" out of that (which I admit is a bit of a mouthful, for which I blame the FSF).</p> <hr> <h2><a name=08-06-2006 />August 6, 2006</h2> <p>Mecurial repository created. Nothing to see yet, move along...</p> <!--#include file="footer.html" -->