Kernel Recipes 2013

Rootfs made easy

with Buildroot

How kernel developers can finally

solve the rootfs problem.

Thomas Petazzoni
Free Electrons
[email protected]

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 Thomas Petazzoni

I CTO and embedded Linux engineer at Free Electrons

I Embedded Linux development: kernel and driver
development, system integration, boot time and power
consumption optimization, consulting, etc.
I Embedded Linux training, Linux driver development training
and Android system development training, with materials
freely available under a Creative Commons license.
I Were hiring!
I http://free-electrons.com
I Contributing the kernel support for the new Armada 370
and Armada XP ARM SoCs from Marvell (widely used in
NAS devices).
I Major contributor to Buildroot, an open-source, simple and
fast embedded Linux build system
I Living in Toulouse, south west of France

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 Doing kernel development is
awesome, but...

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 A kernel without a root filesystem is
kind of useless

input: ImExPS/2 Generic Explorer Mouse as /devices/fpga:07/serio1/input/input1

Root-NFS: no NFS server address
VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy.
VFS: Cannot open root device "(null)" or unknown-block(2,0)
Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(2,0)

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 Solutions often used by kernel dev

I A complete Linux distribution

+ Readily available
- Large (can hardly be used as an initramfs)
- Not available for all architectures
- Not easy to customize.
I A pre-built rootfs
+ Usually relatively small
- Even less flexible
- Not available for all architectures.
I A rootfs built manually with Busybox
+ Smaller and flexible
- Quite some work to create
- Busybox is often not sufficient (testing sound? video? input
devices? graphics? network?).
- Difficult to reproduce for colleagues
There must be something better.
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 Embedded Linux build systems

I Embedded Linux build systems are tools that automate the

process of building a small (or not so small) Linux system
from source.
I From source lot of flexibility
I Generally used to build production embedded Linux systems,
but they can also be used by kernel developers to build small
root filesystems for testing purposes!
I Well-known build systems: OpenEmbedded, Yocto,
Buildroot, PTXdist, etc.
I For me, OE fails the easy to understand, quick to setup test. I
now use Buildroot. Kevin Hilman, ARM kernel developer

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 Buildroot

I Can build a toolchain, a rootfs, a kernel, a bootloader

I Easy to configure: menuconfig, xconfig, etc.
I Fast: builds a simple root filesystem in a few minutes
I Easy to understand: written in make, extensive documentation
I Small root filesystem
I More than 1000 userspace libraries/apps available,
including important development and debug tools (see later)
I Many architectures supported: x86, ARM, PowerPC, MIPS,
SuperH, Blackfin, ARC, Xtensa, Microblaze, Nios II.
I Active community, regular releases
I Used by many embedded system makers, including Google for
the Google Fiber boxes.
I http://buildroot.org

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 Basic usage (1)

make menuconfig

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 Basic usage (2)

make
It builds...
Root filesystem image available in
output/images.

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 initramfs use case: why

I initramfs is great for kernel development because your rootfs

is fully in RAM, and has absolutely no dependency on any
kernel driver. You dont need a storage driver or a network
driver.
I However, since the root filesystem is loaded entirely in RAM,
at every kernel boot, it has to be small. Buildroots ability to
generate really small filesystems is very useful here.

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 initramfs use case: Buildroot side

Example for an ARM Cortex-A8 platform.

I make menuconfig
I Target options, select the ARM architecture, the EABIhf ABI
and the Cortex-A8 architecture variant.
I Toolchain, select External toolchain, and then the Linaro
toolchain.
I System configuration, select the devtmpfs /dev management
method and ensure the serial port for the getty is correct.
I Filesystem images, select the cpio format.
I make
I Your CPIO image is in output/images/rootfs.cpio.
I Contains just Busybox.
I 3 MB uncompressed.
I 2 minutes and 46 seconds of complete build time, on a 2 years
old laptop.

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 initramfs use case: kernel side

The kernel configuration should have:

I CONFIG_INITRAMFS_SOURCE="/path/to/buildroot/
output/images/rootfs.cpio"
I CONFIG_INITRAMFS_COMPRESSION_GZIP=y or some other
compression algorithm
I CONFIG_DEVTMPFS=y, to get devtmpfs support, to provide a
dynamic /dev
I Note that Buildroot does this configuration automatically
when it is responsible for building the kernel. However, when
doing active kernel development, one typically builds the
kernel outside of Buildroot.

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 NFS use case: how

I In Buildroot, select the tar filesystem image format.

I After the build, uncompress as root the image tarball to your
NFS exported directory:
sudo tar -C /nfsroot -xf output/images/rootfs.tar
Note: this can be automated with a post-image script.
I Configure your kernel to mount /nfsroot, and make sure you
have CONFIG_DEVTMPFS, CONFIG_DEVTMPFS_MOUNT,
CONFIG_NFS_FS and CONFIG_ROOT_NFS enabled.
I Do not directly use output/target as the NFS-exported
directory. Permissions and ownership are not correct.

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 Extending your rootfs

Doing kernel development that needs some specific userspace

tools? Buildroot already has a good number of them:
I A must is Dropbear for SSH.
I Benchmarks/testing programs: dhrystone, iozone, bonnie++,
LTP, netperf, ramspeed, stress, lmbench, iostat, memtester,
etc.
I Debugging tools: latencytop, LTTng, trace-cmd, etc.
I Hardware interaction: evtest, i2c-tools, devmem2, pciutils,
usbutils, libv4l, yavta, alsa-utils, linux-firmware, mii-diag, etc.
I Many more packages already available in Buildroot.
I And can be extended with more packages: easy to do, and
well documented in the Buildroot manual.

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 Configuration example 1

Used for my kernel development on Marvell Armada 370/XP.

I For ARM Cortex-A8
BR2_arm=y I Uses mdev for firmware
BR2_cortex_a8=y
BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL=y loading
BR2_ROOTFS_DEVICE_CREATION_DYNAMIC_MDEV=y
BR2_PACKAGE_LINUX_FIRMWARE=y I Has a few firmwares
BR2_PACKAGE_LINUX_FIRMWARE_IWLWIFI_5000=y
BR2_PACKAGE_LINUX_FIRMWARE_MWIFIEX_SD8787=y
BR2_PACKAGE_LINUX_FIRMWARE_RTL_8192=y
I i2c-tools
BR2_PACKAGE_LINUX_FIRMWARE_RTL_8712=y
BR2_PACKAGE_I2C_TOOLS=y I pciutils
BR2_PACKAGE_PCIUTILS=y
BR2_PACKAGE_USBUTILS=y
BR2_PACKAGE_USBUTILS_ZLIB=y
I usbutils
BR2_PACKAGE_DROPBEAR=y
BR2_PACKAGE_ETHTOOL=y
I dropbear
BR2_PACKAGE_IPERF=y
BR2_PACKAGE_IW=y I and various network/wireless
BR2_PACKAGE_MII_DIAG=y
BR2_PACKAGE_WIRELESS_TOOLS=y related tools.
BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_CPIO=y
I Size: 5.6 MB, 13 minutes
build time.

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 Configuration example 2

I Used for my kernel development on Marvell Armada 370/XP

in Big Endian mode.
I A more minimal variant, with just Dropbear, but shows that
doing rootfs for exotic architectures is also possible.

BR2_armeb=y
BR2_cortex_a8=y
BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL=y
BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_PATH="/home/thomas/x-tools/armebv7-marvell-linux-gnueabi-softfp_i686/"
BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_CUSTOM_PREFIX="armeb-marvell-linux-gnueabi"
BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_CUSTOM_GLIBC=y
BR2_TOOLCHAIN_EXTERNAL_CXX=y
BR2_ROOTFS_DEVICE_CREATION_DYNAMIC_DEVTMPFS=y
BR2_PACKAGE_DROPBEAR=y
BR2_TARGET_ROOTFS_CPIO=y

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 Conclusion

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 Questions?

http://buildroot.org

Thomas Petazzoni
[email protected]
Thanks to the Buildroot community (Arnout Vandecappelle, Thomas De
Schampheleire, Peter Korsgaard) and to Kevin Hilman for reviewing the slides.

Slides under CC-BY-SA 3.0

http://free-electrons.com/pub/conferences/2013/kernel-recipes/rootfs-
kernel-developer/
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