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1070_0_Product_Manual - October 28, 2010 8:52 AM
Custom Kernels and Filesystem
You can build the complete filesystem and kernel from the same codebase as Phidgets Inc. uses. The full Buildroot
system can be downloaded from our website. Phidgets Inc. does not provide support for custom filesystems or
kernels, nor do we provide advanced tutorials on the buildroot system. However, this basic information should be
enough to get started.
Buildroot works by building a full cross-compiler for the PhidgetSBC and then using that to build a full set of tools
to create a root filesystem from scratch. It also handles building the kernel. You can use the cross compiler that it
produces to build your own applications for the PhidgetSBC independently of the system, or integrate your code
into the process. Buildroot downloads all of the source code it needs from open-source repositories, so the Buildroot
distribution itself is fairly small.
Buildroot needs to be run on Linux. Unpack the distribution and run the following commands to set everything up:
‘touch .config’
•
‘make BOARD=phidget_sbc getconfig’
•
You can build your filesystem by typing ‘make’ and change configuration options using ‘make menuconfig’. Output
binaries are located in binaries/phidget_sbc - the .bin files are accepted by the PhidgetSBC upgrade system.
Building the full filesystem relies on some packages which you will need to install into your Linux distribution,
including but not limited to: libacl1-dev, zlib1g-dev, kaffe, liblzo2-dev. If you make changes to config files, source,
etc., run ‘rm_root’ before running make, otherwise the filesystem may not be updated properly. Kernel patches are
stored in: target/device/PhidgetSBC/.
More information about Buildroot can be found here: http://buildroot.uclibc.org/docs.html
