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I am working on an arm embedded platform based on the Cortex A9, very similar to the hummingboard (http://www.solid-run.com/products/hummingboard/).

I am working on porting over some of our software that was previously running on a beaglebone. Our software is python based but uses some ctypes, an internal c library as well as several python modules and a rabbitmq server. On the beaglebone, setting this up was easy because there is a lot of support and ubuntu based distros that make it simple to install packages.

I have a linaro cross compiler and a uboot and rootfs image given to us by the manufacturer of the platform. Manually cross compiling and building all of our necessary dependencies is turning into quite a headache, as everything has little quirks. I do not have a native development toolchain that can run on the arm device.

I am looking for a simpler way to do some of these tasks. Buildroot sounds like exactly what I need, but I am not sure how I would make it work with an already existing rootfs and toolchain. Unfortunately, I don't know all the details of the rootfs and how the hardware is brought up, so I don't think I can replicate the settings exactly using buildroot.

Another option I was looking into was somehow using the rootfs with QEMU and building a native toolchain to run on it, which would allow me to manually build the dependencies without needing to deal with the headaches of cross compiling.

Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks.

gabe_torres
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1 Answers1

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Buildroot is designed to generate an entire rootfs, not to "complement" an existing one. So if you were to use Buildroot, you should get rid of the existing root filesystem, and use the new one generated by Buildroot.

Also, note that if you were happy with the Debian distro running on your BeagleBone, you can also run Debian on your Hummingboard.

Thomas Petazzoni
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  • Unfortunately, I am not using the hummingboard stock. The platform is a modified version of the same architecture (same processor, memory, etc, but different peripherals). – gabe_torres Jan 02 '15 at 14:46
  • How does this matter? – Thomas Petazzoni Jan 06 '15 at 14:50
  • Well, I did not design or create this platform, and it has some modifications that differ from the hummingboard reference design. I do not have enough information or the ability to re-create the work that has already been done on the existing rootfs in order to do hw bring-up. A hummingboard debian distribution will most likely not run vanilla on this platform. – gabe_torres Jan 07 '15 at 15:33
  • Well any modifications would be on the HW-level, right? Have you asked for the U-Boot source (patches) and the the same for the kernel? That ought to get your board up'n'running using a complete buildroot build. – Anders Jan 08 '15 at 07:10