Using Buildroot for PowerPC embedded systems

From SecretLab

Buildroot is a useful tool for building Linux images for embedded systems. It can download and compile the software components needed for an embedded system (Linux kernel, bootloader, busybox, etc.) and package them up into usable binary images which can be downloaded and run on an embedded target.

Historically, most of the development of Buildroot has focused on support for uClinux and the ARM architecture. While PowerPC is supported, it often takes more effort to get Buildroot to successfully build for a PowerPC architecture. This page documents my process for using Buildroot to prepare images for both Freescale MPC5200 and Xilinx Virtex target platforms.

Getting Buildroot

You can get a copy of Buildroot directly from the buildroot website at http://buildroot.uclibc.org/download.html. Tarballs and anonymous SVN access are available. Secret Lab maintains a git mirror of the SVN repository at [git://git.secretlab.ca/git/buildroot] (gitweb page: [1]).

Commentary

I've also been toying with OpenEmbedded. The amount of infrastructure used in OpenEmbedded appeals to me, but in general I find that I get buried in OpenEmbedded's complexity and I have yet to successfully build a PowerPC image with it.