[Buildroot] How to add a board with Buildroot 2011.02

[Thomas De Schampheleire]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 10:42 PM, Thomas Petazzoni
<thomas.petazzoni at free-electrons.com> wrote:
[...]
>
> The policy I'd like to see is to not add several skeletons to the
> mainline Buildroot tree, or at least not skeleton that are
> board-specific. But of course, it's only my opinion, and as a community
> project, the opinion of others also count.
>
> So, there are three cases :
>
>  *) The changes needed compared to the official skeleton can be
>    directly integrated into this official skeleton, because they make
>    sense in a generic way. In this case, send some patches on the
>    official skeleton, and we'll discuss them.
>
>  *) The changes needed are interesting outside of the specifities of a
>    particular hardware platform (and I think it's generally the case),
>    then we can add a generic Buildroot option that will adjust the
>    official skeleton as needed at build time. This is for example
>    something that is being done for choosing between static /dev,
>    devtmpfs, udev or mdev. It could be done for other customizations.
>
>  *) The changes needed are very board-specific and cannot be considered
>    as generic enough to be configuration options, in that case, what
>    I'd suggest is a post-build script (BR2_ROOTFS_POST_BUILD_SCRIPT)
>    that modifies the target filesystem, potentially by copying files
>    from the board/<manufacturer>/<boardname> folder.
>
> Don't hesitate to discuss on the list the modifications you need on the
> skeleton, so that we can sort out together into which of the following
> three cases your modifications fall.
>

In my case, a non-consumer non-interactive device, we have made the
following changes to the skeleton:
* /etc/inittab, to startup some extra getty's, and to add a 'sleep 1'
before doing that because one baudrate is very low (9600) which causes
the last messages from the init scripts not to be displayed
* Extra init scripts, to startup the project-specific applications,
load drivers etc.
* Add directories to hold the project specific applications, drivers etc.

I expect that this is very common usage of buildroot for people
working on specific boards.
* The getty configuration could be made more generic (we need more
than one, which is (was?) not possible with the generic_serial
option).
* For the 'sleep 1', I'm not sure if there are more elegant solutions.
If indeed this is a generic problem for slow baud rates, then it could
be added to mainline buildroot
* The extra init scripts could be added in a generic way as well, by
providing a path to custom init scripts (either to be added to the
default ones, if any; or to replace the default ones completely)
* Creation of directories (and maybe extra files) could either be done
with a post-build script, or with an 'overlay' to the filesystem (so
not containing a full skeleton, but only a delta). This overlay could
actually also be used for the init scripts.

Best regards,
thomas