Buildroot presentation at Embedded Linux Conference 2009

Hi,

Even though I'm by far not the most active developer of Buildroot, I thought that the recent revival of the project was an interesting opportunity to promote the project. So, I've submitted a presentation for the Embedded Linux Conference [1], that will be held from April, 6th to April, 8th in San Francisco, US and this presentation has been accepted [2].

I will both present why systems like Buildroot are necessary (cross-compilation is painful, sharing recipes is nice, and having an automated and reproducible build systems is a must) and then how Buildroot fill these needs, how it works and how it can be extended.

I'll try to share my slides prior to the conference so that the Buildroot community can help in improving the presentation so that the project will be promoted as best as possible.

Sincerly,

Thomas

[1] http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_2009/index.html
[2] http://www.embeddedlinuxconference.com/elc_2009/sessions.html#Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers and embedded Linux development,
consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com

Thomas> Hi,

Thomas> Even though I'm by far not the most active developer of Thomas> Buildroot, I thought that the recent revival of the project Thomas> was an interesting opportunity to promote the project. So, Thomas> I've submitted a presentation for the Embedded Linux Thomas> Conference [1], that will be held from April, 6th to April, Thomas> 8th in San Francisco, US and this presentation has been Thomas> accepted [2].

Great, thanks for doing this!

Thomas> I'll try to share my slides prior to the conference so that Thomas> the Buildroot community can help in improving the Thomas> presentation so that the project will be promoted as best as Thomas> possible.

Perfect.

Bye, Peter Korsgaard

Le Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:20:02 +0100,
Peter Korsgaard <[email protected]> a ?crit :

A first draft of the slides is available at :

http://free-electrons.com/~thomas/buildroot-conf/buildroot.pdf
http://free-electrons.com/~thomas/buildroot-conf/buildroot.odp

Really don't hesitate to give our critics about the presentation, what Buildroot advantages I forgot, and what interesting aspects of Buildroot are not covered. I really would like to make it a nice and attractive presentation of Buildroot features and capabilities.

I have a 50 minutes slot for the conference (and the conference is just before the dinner break, so it can be a bit longer). And clearly, the contents of the slides currently do not fill this time slot. So don't hesitate to suggest more contents if appropriate.

Thanks!

Thomas

Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers and embedded Linux development,
consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com

Hi Thomas,

On page 7, you might want to add ARM to the Atmel bullet. We have
defconfigs for Atmel ARM kits and Ulf works specifically with that stuff from what I understand.

About openwrt, it's a very different fork, not sure if we can call
it buildroot anymore. They have a different way to organize their makefiles and they employ function calls inside those makefiles much more heavily than we do.

That's all I could think of. Nice work :)

Kind Regards,
Thiago A. Correa

Very nice, and when all done, make sure you get it put on the buildroot.org website as documentation.

It seems to me that buildroot is a union of multiple builds.

1) Gcc and uclibc
2) Busybox
3) root file system and source packages
4) Linux kernel
5) bootstrap -u-boot, grub etc.

1 and 2 are configurable, but I don't think most people do much customization. They are reasonably stable packages and seem to integrate well.

3 is now under control with Peter fixing the packages and for the first time really reliably building with at least the defaults.

4 and 5 are configurable, but not really within the buildroot menu/make system. I think a slide or two describing how you, in your demo customize and build the kernel and bootstrap would be great. Also how you knit together the root file system and the bootstrap and kernel via a multiple flash filesystem or single disk image. I think many people just copy the files together into some final nfs or flash form, but I don't think it is well described or documented.

What I think would be great for people learning and evaluating buildroot is a documented procedure to do a minimal, default build that would generate an x86 image (using grub?) that could be run tested via qemu or vmware. This would also allow people to work on their application while the real embedded hardware was being "brought up". It would also be a more automated way to test new buildroot releases.

My $.02

Regards, Steve