Difference between revisions of "Buildrom"

Revision as of 21:49, 22 April 2008

Buildrom is a tool that can construct a coreboot image (comprising the coreboot loader and payload) from scratch.

Starting from a configuration file, it will download and build all the code necessary to construct the final binary.

A tool with similar functionality is Etherboot's ROM-o-matic which builds etherboot as a coreboot ELF payload.

Supported Platforms/Boards

Buildrom currently supports the following platforms / mainboards:

Supported Payloads

Buildrom currently supports the following payloads:

• Linux (kernel)
• Etherboot
• FILO
• "Linux-as-bootloader" (LAB)
• Memtest86 (except on the GA-M57SLI-S4 and the Tyan S2891)
• coreinfo
• tint
• libpayload as helper library for other payloads (e.g. coreinfo)
• Custom payloads provided by the user

Experimental or untested payloads:

• GRUB2
• OpenFirmware

Planned payloads:

• ADLO
• GPXE

Download

$ svn co svn://coreboot.org/buildrom

You can also visit the web-based trac instance to browse the code and outstanding issues.

Prerequisites

You will need the following packages on your system to use buildrom. Please consult your distribution documentation on how to install new packages:

• wget
• subversion
• git
• make
• quilt
• GNU compiler tools (gcc, as, ld)
• Standard utilities (rm, cp, gzip, bzip2, tar, dd, md5sum, awk, etc.)
• iasl (for AMD K8 platforms)
• python
• ruby (for the GRUB2 payload)

Configuration

In the buildrom-devel directory, type:

$ make menuconfig

You can now navigate the configuration system (this is the same configuration engine that the Linux kernel uses, so it should be familiar to some readers).

Building the ROM

Make sure you have access to the Internet (to download new packages), and type the following to create your ROM:

$ make

Buildrom will download and build all the components of the ROM selected in the configuration stage. If the build is successful, then the final ROM will be located in the deploy subdirectory. If it is not successful, then you will see an error message. You can see the build output for each package by reading build.log in the work/<package>/logs directory (e.g. work/filo/logs/build.log).

Developing within Buildrom

This section is for the developers who wish to change and rebuild the code. Buildrom builds the code for coreboot and the payloads in the work/ directory.

Here is a typical view of the buildrom work/ directory:

$ ls work/
  coreboot  filo  nrvb2

In each directory, you will find three directories. Logs from the build will be found in logs/ and timestamps that the build system uses are in stamps/. You normally won't have to touch these directories. The source code is located in the third directory, svn/.

Buildrom provides several commands to make it easy to rebuild individual packages and ROMs.

• To clean a directory (but not remove the source code) use make <package>-clean.
• You can build individual packages with make <package>.
• If you wish to completely erase the source code and start again with a pristine version, use make <package>-distclean.
• Typing make at any time will rebuild the ROM using the most current versions of the individual packages.

Here is a typical work flow for modifying coreboot code:

1. Build the initial ROM from scratch with 'make'
2. Edit the coreboot source code in work/coreboot/svn/
3. Clean the coreboot package with make coreboot-clean
4. Rebuild the ROM with make'