Re: Build embedded Linux system on ARM based board



Ulf Samuelsson wrote:
Steven Woody wrote:
hi,

we are about to move our development to ARM + Linux. The board will
be ARM9 based, and, most likely NOT be a standard one.

i think we firstly need to build a cross-compile development
environment on our host computers ( that are already running slackware
or redhat linux ), then next step will be build and put an embeded
linux OS, as well as some basic utilities, down to the target board.


You might want to investigate "buildroot".
"buildroot" is an open source distributed makefile system which
can be easily extended.
It can be downloaded from "buildroot.uclibc.org".

You start by configuring the system

$ make menuconfig

And you will get a DOS like menu system allowing you
to select which gcc/binutils/uclibc version you want for your crosscompiler.
Then you select what packages you want to have in your root file system.
What filesystem type should your root file system use (CRAMFS,JFFS,EXT2
etc.)
Finally you can specify which board you should use, and then
buildroot can build the Linux kernel and the U-Boot boot monitor
togehter with other useful utilities.
If you have a web server, then you can put the html files in a directory
which gets included in the root file system.

After the system, is configured, you just type

$ make

and buildroot will build the cross compiler system, the root file system
linux and u-boot for you. It will download any needed package using passive
ftp.

At the end, everything gets copied to the /tftpboot directory for download
for the board.

Since this is extensible, all these features are not available for all
board/chips
but it is almost there for the AT91RM9200EK booting from dataflash.

I put my AT91 buildroot at ftp://at91dist:distrib@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/ in the
third party Linux support directory.
(Please note that that is my private stuff and not supported by Atmel)

I built it under OpenSuse 10.1 and there are a few rpm's lacking
like "po4a" which needs to be installed before running OK.

Once you get past the first hurdles, buildroot is a good (free) tool.

In order to get you running on a non-standard board you will have to port:

* U-Boot
* Linux
Update the buildroot target directory creating configuration and makefile
scripts for Linux and U-boot.

thanks. this step with my non-standard board is what i question
about. i have to grasp this before involve into buildroot. is my
understand right?



I have not managed to build gdb using buildroot for some reason.

You already selected your ARM9 CPU then?
(Can't tempt you with an AT91 :-)




.



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