Buildroot training course updated to Buildroot 2017.08

Back in June 2015, we announced the availability of a training course on Buildroot, a popular and easy to use embedded Linux build system. A year later, we updated it to cover Buildroot 2016.05. We are happy to announce a new update: we now cover Buildroot 2017.08.

The most significant updates are:

• Presentation of the Long Term Supported releases of Buildroot, a topic we also presented in a previous blog post
• Appearance of the new top-level utils/ directory, containing various utilities directly useful for the Buildroot user, such as test-pkg, check-package, get-developers or scanpypi
• Removal of $(HOST_DIR)/usr/, as everything has been moved up one level to $(HOST_DIR), to make the Buildroot SDK/toolchain more conventional
• Document the new organization of the skeleton package, now split into several packages, to properly support various init systems. A new diagram has been added to clarify this topic.
• List all package infrastructures that are available in Buildroot, since their number is growing!
• Use SPDX license codes for licensing information in packages, which is now mandatory in Buildroot
• Remove the indication that dependencies of host (i.e native) packages are derived from the dependencies of the corresponding package, since it’s no longer the case
• Indicate that the check for hashes has been extended to also allow checking the hash of license files. This allows to detect changes in the license text.
• Update the BR2_EXTERNAL presentation to cover the fact that multiples BR2_EXTERNAL trees are supported now.
• Use the new relocatable SDK functionality that appeared in Buildroot 2017.08.

The practical labs have of course been updated to use Buildroot 2017.08, but also Linux 4.13 and U-Boot 2017.07, to remain current with upstream versions. In addition, they have been extended with two additional steps:

• Booting the Buildroot generated system using TFTP and NFS, as an alternative to the SD card we normally use
• Using genimage to generate a complete and ready to flash SD card image

We will be delivering this course to one of our customers in Germany next month, and are of course available to deliver it on-site anywhere in the world if you’re interested! And of course, we continue to publish, for free, all the materials used in this training session: slides and labs.