Raspberry Pi "tools" (raspistill, vcgencmd, ...) not included with buildroot

Question

I've created a basic image with buildroot (buildroot-2021.02.1), containing some software and also selected the RPI firmware in order to use the camera and some Raspberry Pi tools: Target packages --> Hardware handling --> Firmware --> ([x] rpi-firmware) --> Firmware to boot as mentioned here.

But the tools raspistill, vcgencmd, ... are not included. The question is how to include them and why are they not included?

At some point in time it must have been working, see: RaspberryPi camera with buildroot

More details:

In the logs of buildroot the following lines show up:

>>> rpi-firmware d016a6eb01c8c7326a89cb42809fed2a21525de5 Installing to target
comm: /home/ich/br/buildroot/output/build/rpi-firmware-d016a6eb01c8c7326a89cb42809fed2a21525de5/.files-list.before: No such file or directory
comm: /home/ich/br/buildroot/output/build/rpi-firmware-d016a6eb01c8c7326a89cb42809fed2a21525de5/.files-list-staging.before: No such file or directory
comm: /home/ich/br/buildroot/output/build/rpi-firmware-d016a6eb01c8c7326a89cb42809fed2a21525de5/.files-list-host.before: No such file or directory

and inside this package the binaries are existing. They are downloaded from http://sources.buildroot.net/rpi-firmware/ where the tars contain the actual tools. But they are not copied into the final image by buildroot but only downloaded. Maybe because some files-list.txt file(s) are missing, as pointed out by the error message. Maybe those files are whitelisting the files to copy. But I could not find documentation about this.

For 64-bit builds the binaries in the (then manually downloaded) tar file could not be executed, because they are 32-bit executables: firmware-d016a6eb01c8c7326a89cb42809fed2a21525de5/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.1.9, not stripped; on a 32-bit build with buildroot it also does not work, because the shared libraries are missing, even though the full structure from the archive has been placed under /opt/vc/{bin|lib|...} like on a standard RPI image.

I'm unsure how to proceed with the problem, diagnose it and fix it.

EDIT: maybe this are two different problems; I read the linked SO question once again and compared the files fixup.dat and start.elf (which contain the RPI hardware stuff to make the tools work) in the boot.vfat of the built image with the images in buildroot/output/build/rpi-firmware-d016a6eb01c8c7326a89cb42809fed2a21525de5/boot and the files fixup_x.dat and start_x.elf are taken from there. So is in accordance to the mentioned SO question. And at no place it is indicated that the tools for the Raspberry Pi are compiled. They are only inside this tar archive. Maybe one needs to compile them extra and this package is not designed to integrate those tools.

Answer 1

I figured out the solution and this might be useful for future reference, so I put the solution here.

One have to differentiate between:

• the "firmware" (that is the mentioned tar from the question), which is turned on with BR2_PACKAGE_RPI_FIRMWARE=y in buildroot. This causes then that the start.elf and fixup.dat contain the correct data from this tar. The fact that the tars also contain the desired binaries is only "coincidence"
• the desired applications are packaged as "userland" (see here) and if one finds the # BR2_PACKAGE_RPI_USERLAND is not set line in .config in the buildroot project's root directory and replaces this line by BR2_PACKAGE_RPI_USERLAND=y the applications (vcgencmd, raspistill, ...) are being built and included into the final image (I could not find the location in make menuconfig however, but this is no problem, if you directly modify the vars)

Therefore, the question is answered. But: you might run into some issues ;-) :

---

Question 1: I get a "Segmentation fault" when running raspistill

For raspistill -o i.jpg you might get out:

mmal: mmal_vc_shm_init: could not initialize vc shared memory service
mmal: mmal_vc_component_create: failed to initialise shm for 'vc.camera_info' (7:EIO)
mmal: mmal_component_create_core: could not create component 'vc.camera_info' (7)
mmal: Failed to create camera_info component
Segmentation fault

(with an empty image file), see here for details.

Answer: this is related to /dev/vcsm (or /dev/vcsm-csa) missing which is used for camera control / video decoding "stuff". Symlinking to /dev/vc-mem as stated somewhere around the net does not help.

Solution: I was using the latest BR with Kernel 5.10.x (buildroot-2021.02.1 and simply "dowgraded" to buildroot-2020.02.1, rebuilt it and /dev/vcsm appears and everything works fine.

Question 2: I want to do it in docker containers

Answer: No problem. I used balenalib/rpi-raspbian:latest (as suggested here) and it worked flawlessly by running docker run --privileged --device=/dev/vchiq --rm -it balenalib/rpi-raspbian:latest. For this only the proper devices and the support is needed. So the package BR2_PACKAGE_RPI_USERLAND=y could be completely omitted.

Question 3: Does it work with 64-bit?

Answer: No. I tried out the recent version (raspberrypi3_64_defconfig) of buildroot and the version from Feb 2020 as mentioned and for both /dev/vcsm (or /dev/vcsm-csa) is missing. Linux cpi64 4.19.97-v8 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Apr 17 14:13:11 CEST 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux