Buildroot Getting Started Guide

  1. Introduction
  2. For the impatients
  3. Build & flashing instructions
  4. Customization
    1. Configuration
    2. Create a new package
    3. Use BR2_EXTERNAL
  5. Going further
Nitrogen93 SMARCNitrogen6X SOMNitrogen8M Mini SBCNitrogen8M Mini SMARCNitrogen8M Mini SOMNitrogen8M Nano SOMNitrogen8M Plus SMARCNitrogen8M Plus SOMNitrogen8M SBCNitrogen8M SOMNitrogen8ULP SOM

This post intends to gather all the information you need to start a project based on Buildroot. It relies on the 2015.11 release but applies to other versions. This post is largely inspired from Free Electrons Buildroot training, with a focus towards our platforms and Freescale-specific packages.

Introduction

When choosing a build system for an embedded Linux project, many options are available such as: Yocto/OpenEmbedded, PTXdist, Buildroot, LTIB, OpenBricks, OpenWRT, etc...

However nowadays the two most popular ones are:

  • Yocto/OpenEmbedded
    • Builds a complete Linux distribution with binary packages.
    • Most powerful option but also the most complex.
    • Officially supported by Freescale.
  • Buildroot
    • Builds a root filesystem image, no binary packages.
    • Much simpler to use, understand and modify.

Although Freescale is only supporting Yocto, Buildroot offers the same level of support in most instances in regards to the Freescale-specific packages. For instance, the Buildroot 2015.11 release is using the exact same Freescale packages as the Fido release of Yocto.

Here are the key features of Buildroot:

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