Repo Manifests for building systems based on meta-sdr

This repository provides Repo manifests to setup the OpenEmbedded build system with meta-sdr and some interesting boards

OpenEmbedded allows the creation of custom linux distributions for embedded systems. It is a collection of git repositories known as layers each of which provides recipes to build software packages as well as configuration information.

Repo is a tool that enables the management of many git repositories given a single manifest file. Tell repo to fetch a manifest from this repository and it will fetch the git repositories specified in the manifest and, by doing so, setup an OpenEmbedded build environment for you!

Getting Started

1. Install Repo.

   Download the Repo script.

   $ curl http://commondatastorage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > repo
   

   Make it executable.

   $ chmod a+x repo
   

   Move it on to your system path.

   $ sudo mv repo /usr/local/bin/
   

2. Initialize a Repo client.

   Create an empty directory to hold your working files.

   $ mkdir oe-repo
   $ cd oe-repo
   

   Tell Repo where to find the manifest

   $ repo init -u git://github.com/balister/oe-gnuradio-manifest.git -b stable
   

   A successful initialization will end with a message stating that Repo is initialized in your working directory. Your client directory should now contain a .repo directory where files such as the manifest will be kept.

   ---

   Note You can use the -b switch to specify the branch of the repository to use. I develop on master so it might be iffy at times. Use the "stable" branch fornormal work.

   The -m switch selects the manifest file (default is default.xml).

   To test out the bleeding edge, type:

   $ repo init -u git://github.com/balister/oe-gnuradio-manifest.git
   

   To get back to the known stable version, type:

   $ repo init -u git://github.com/balister/oe-gnuradio-manifest -b stable
   

   To learn more about repo, look at http://source.android.com/source/version-control.html

   ---

3. Fetch all the repositories.

   $ repo sync
   

   Now go put on the coffee machine as this may take 20 minutes depending on your connection.

4. Initialize the OpenEmbedded Environment. This assumes you created the oe-core directory in your home directory.

   $ TEMPLATECONF=`pwd`/meta-sdr/conf source ./oe-core/oe-init-build-env ./build ./bitbake
   

   This copies default configuration information into the build/conf* directory and sets up some environment variables for OpenEmbedded. You may wish to edit the configuration options at this point.

5. Build an image.

   This process downloads several gigabytes of source code and then proceeds to do an awful lot of compilation so make sure you have plenty of space (25GB minimum). Go drink some beer.

   $ export MACHINE="zedboard-zynq7" (default is ettus-e1xx)
   $ bitbake gnuradio-dev-image
   

   If everything goes well, you should have a compressed root filesystem tarball as well as kernel and bootloader binaries available in your work/deploy directory. If you run into problems, the most likely candidate is missing packages. Check out http://www.yoctoproject.org/docs/current/yocto-project-qs/yocto-project-qs.html#resources for the list of required packagaes for operating system. Also, take a look to be sure your operating system is supported: https://wiki.yoctoproject.org/wiki/Distribution_Support

6. Build an SDK for cross compiling gnuradio on an x86 machine.

   Run:

   $ export MACHINE="zedboard-zynq7" (only if MACHINE is not already set)
   $ bitbake -c populate_sdk gnuradio-dev-image
   

   When this completes the sdk is in ./tmp-eglibc/deploy/sdk/ as an .sh file you copy to the machine you want to cross compile on and run the file. It will default to installing the sdk in /usr/local, and you can ask it to install anywhere you have write access to.

Staying Up to Date

To pick up the latest changes for all source repositories, run:

$ repo sync

Enter the OpenEmbedded environment:

$ . oe-core/oe-init-build-env ./build ./bitbake

If you forget to setup these environment variables prior to running bitbake,
your OS will complain that it can't find bitbake on the path.  Don't try
to install bitbake using a package manager, just run the command.

You can then rebuild as before:

$ bitbake gnuradio-dev-image

Starting from Fresh

So it is borked. You're not really sure why. But it doesn't work any more.

There are several degrees of starting fresh.

1. clean a package: bitbake -c cleansstate
2. re-download package: bitbake -c cleanall
3. destroy everything but downloads: rm -rf build (or whereever your sstate and work directories are)
4. destroy it all (not recommended): rm -rf build && rm -rf sources There are several degrees of starting fresh.

Customize

Sooner or later, you'll want to customize some aspect of the image either adding more packages, picking up some upstream patches, or tweaking your kernel. To this, you'll want to customize the Repo manifest to point at different repositories and branches or pull in additional meta-layers.

Clone this repository (or fork it on github):

$ git clone git://github.com/balister/oe-gnuradio-manifest.git

Make your changes (and contribute them back if they are generally useful :) ), and then re-initialize your repo client

$ repo init -u <file:///path/to/your/git/repository.git>

Known Good Machines

These machines have been tested:

zedboard-zynq7 ettus-e1xx (need to use kernel+modules from official image) imx6sabre-lite

Please send success stories to [email protected].