Buildroot 2013.05 released, Bootlin contributions inside!

Buildroot logoAs planned by the release schedule, the Buildroot 2013.05 version landed at the end of May. Peter Korsgaard, the project’s maintainer, highlighted the most important additions in his release email. With more than 900 commits, it has been the busiest ever development cycle, showing that the Buildroot project is more and more active.

With 175 commits in this release, Bootlin has again participated significantly to the development of Buildroot:

   217  Gustavo Zacarias
   167  Thomas Petazzoni (Bootlin)
   109  Will Wagner
    86  Peter Korsgaard
    44  Simon Dawson
    27  Yann E. MORIN
    25  gilles.talis@gmail.com
[...]
     6  Maxime Ripard (Bootlin)
[...]
     1  Alexandre Belloni (Bootlin)
     1  Ezequiel Garcia (Bootlin)
[...]

Amongst the features and improvements contributed by Bootlin:

  • Support for the next generation Wayland display server has been added. For now, only Wayland over the framebuffer is supported, but additional improvements are expected to come in the future.
  • Integration of packages to build all the Qt5 components: qt5base, qt5declarative, qt5graphicaleffects, qt5imageformats, qt5jsbackends, qt5multimedia, qt5quick1, qt5script, qt5svg, qt5webkit and qt5xmlpatterns.
  • A mechanism of virtual packages to expose the OpenGL, OpenVG and EGL implementations has been put in place, with for now the RasberryPi providing such implementations. Those virtual packages are for example used in the Qt5 packages mentionned above, for those that require OpenGL.
  • A cleanup of Buildroot core dependencies: flex and bison are no longer mandatory to use Buildroot, they are automatically built when needed. This apparently simple move required a number of fixes and updated to a significant number of packages.
  • Many external toolchains were updated, especially the Linaro toolchains.
  • The build process of gdb was converted to the package infrastructure, instead of being a hand-written Makefile. This is part of an effort to progressively convert the toolchain building process to the package infrastructure.
  • A default configuration was added for the Atmel AT91SAM9G45M10-EK evaluation board, which allows Buildroot users to easily build a minimal working system for this platform.
  • A number of build issues were fixed by Maxime Ripard, thanks to the daily automated builds done by the Bootlin Jenkins system that Maxime has set up.
  • A huge number of build issues trigerred by the autobuilders have also been fixed thanks to Bootlin engineers contributions.

In addition to this, Thomas Petazzoni has done some major improvements to the automated build system that the Buildroot project uses, which he detailed in an e-mail sent to the project mailing list. These improvements make the autobuilder infrastructure more scalable, and allows to provide statistics, and a much better daily report sent to the project’s mailing list.

In detail, the contributions of Bootlin were:

Thomas Petazzoni

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

3 thoughts on “Buildroot 2013.05 released, Bootlin contributions inside!”

  1. Does it support Qt5.0 or also the recent released Qt5.1 version?
    The “mechanism of virtual packages to expose the OpenGL, OpenVG and EGL “, does it mean that OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL libraries will be also included into generated rootfs? for any platform?

    Thanks in advance, and congratulations for the nice job and big effort!

    Santiago

    Reply

    1. For now, we support Qt 5.0, and not yet Qt 5.1, but it is on my TODO-list to add Qt 5.1 support, though others are welcome to submit patches to do so.

      Yes, the OpenGL ES and EGL libraries are automatically included in the generated root filesystem, that’s the whole point of having Buildroot packages for those libraries.

      And no, it doesn’t work for any platform, simply because it is not possible: the OpenGL ES and EGL implementations are inherently platform-specific, so each SoC vendor provides its own implementation, and we must create packages for each of them. For now, we have support for the Rasberry Pi OpenGL libraries, the OMAP3/AM335x OpenGL libraries, and we’re adding the package for the Allwinner OpenGL implementation. We intend to add more in the future, but we also welcome contributions in this area.

      Do not hesitate to contact the Buildroot mailing list for further details.

      Reply

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