Vulcan image

This is a custom Linux image with Vulcan components included. Buildroot is used to configure and manage this image for various platforms like x86 or ARM.

Development Setup

It is REQUIRED to run these commands on a powerful Linux machine.

First clone the repo from GitHub:

git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:vulcan-rs/image.git

Dependencies

See here

There are a few required dependencies to use Buildroot and build a custom Linux image. These can be installed (on Arch) via:

yay -S which sed make binutils diffutils gcc bash patch gzip bzip2 perl tar cpio unzip rsync file bc findutils

Then you can make changes to the config via make menuconfig (this is a terminal based config tool) or via make xconfig (QT based GUI).

ccache

See here

Enable ccache in the build options. The cache directory is defined by BR2_CCACHE_DIR with a default value of $HOME/.buildroot-ccache.

External tree

See here

The first time we call make menuconfig or make xconfig we need to pass BR2_EXTERNAL with either an absolute or relative path. This repo uses a relative path: ../external. So the initial command looks like this:

make BR2_EXTERNAL=.. menuconfig

All subsequent make calls will use this path automatically in the .br2-external.mk file. To create the defconfig, we can call this command in the output directory:

cd output
make savedefconfig

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After configuration, you can build the custom image via make. This will take quite a few minutes.

make BR2_EXTERNAL=../external 0=../output vulcan_x86_64_defconfig

To boot the image locally we can use QEMU:

qemu-system-x86_64 -kernel output/images/bzImage -drive file=output/images/rootfs.ext4,if=virtio,format=raw \
  -append "rootwait root=/dev/vda console=tty1 console=ttyS0" -net nic,model=virtio -net user -accel kvm \
  -cpu host -m 1024 -serial stdio