[Buildroot] Article for the German Linux magazine

[Alexander Dahl]

Hei hei,

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 10:45:20AM +0200, Arnout Vandecappelle wrote:
>  Hi all,
> 
>  About two weeks ago, we got a mail on the list asking for a volunteer to
> write an introductory article about Buildroot for the IoT-themed issue of
> the German Linux magazine. I volunteered two rite such an article.
> 
>  I have an outline or rough draft below. It's just bullet points (though I
> ended up writing sentences for most of it). I'd like to get feedback on:
> 
> - Is there anything missing that I should mention in the article?
> 
> - Is there something in here which is incorrect?
> 
> - Is there something here that we actually don't want to draw attention to?
> 
>  Please *do not* pay attention to style or spelling or little details that
> are missing.
> 
> 
>  Thank you for your help!
> 
> 
>  Regards,
>  Arnout
> 
> 
> Buildroot for IoT
> 
> For IoT distro is important:
> - getting a basic system up and running quickly;
> - small footprint (sometimes only 64MB of flash)
> - control over what you build;
> - support for all major cloud services
> - easy integration of own components;
> - attention for security issues.
> 
> Buildroot is a build system that grew out of uClinux and busybox, so with a
> focus on very small systems.
> Meanwhile, it supports all kinds of different use cases, ranging from
> (still) systems with only a few MB of flash, over docker images for cloud
> deployments, to complex systems with a graphical stack, database, etc.
> The principles of Buildroot are
> - simplicity;
> - flexibility to build exactly the system you want;
> - reproducibility: if you rebuild the same configuration years later, you
> should get the same result bit-for-bit;
> - maintainability.
> 
> With Buildroot, you can build a system by choosing which packages you want
> and some other options in a menu system (based on that of the Linux kernel).
> On that basis, Buildroot will download and build the source code of the
> selected packages and compile it into the root file system.
> You can also add your own extra files, for example configuration files or
> your own application.
> To get you started, there are sample configurations for about 230 boards
> that you can buy off-the-shelf, plus about 40 configurations for simulation
> in qemu.
> However, it is easy enough to make your own configuration, as long as you
> know which CPU variant you have and which bootloader and kernel options
> (device tree) to use.
> 
> In practice, however, you will almost always want to add your own application.
> For that, you can generate an SDK that you can use to build the application,
> e.g. in an IDE.
> But it is also very easy to create a new package for your application.
> If you use one of the supported build systems (meson, cmake, autotools,
> qmake, waf, cargo, go, python, rebar), a few lines are usually enough.
> 
> Apart from the flexibility of the choice of packages (e.g. 4 different init
> systems, 3 different C libraries, 15 different root file systems, more than
> 10 different web servers or web frameworks), the flexibility is mainly in
> the possibilities to modify the root file system, to add configuration
> files, etc. Because of the large amount of freedom, the choice of packages
> is often limited to a few lines. However, with so much freedom, there is no
> standard way to implement some common use cases, e.g., readonly root file
> system with a separate partition for persistence, or a verified boot process
> with hardware TPM. It is possible to implement all these things, but you
> have to figure out how.
> 
> There are some projects that use buildroot to build a more managed (and thus
> less flexible) "distro": SkiffOS, dahliaOS, Batocera Linux, Home Assistant
> Operating System.

fli4l [1] is also using buildroot, but development has stalled in the
last two years after we could not do on site meetings anymore. :-/

Greets
Alex

[1] http://www.fli4l.de/en/home/whats-that-fli4l/

> 
> For security issues, buildroot has a system that automatically detects CVEs.
> The list of packages is updated weekly on
> http://autobuild.buildroot.net/stats/master.html. A mail is also sent to the
> people who signed up as developers for the package.
> In addition, Buildroot offers the classical global hardening options: stack
> smashing protection, PIC/PIE, RELRO, buffer overflow detection.
> 
> Internally, Buildroot uses GNU make to drive the build, supported by shell
> scripts and some C code (mostly copied and adapted from elsewhere).
> The infrastructure consists of about 5000 lines GNU make, 5000 lines shell
> scripts, and 20000 lines C code (mainly for the Kconfig infrastructure). The
> make code is not so easy to understand (because make is a strange language),
> but it is still manageable. Moreover, adjustments to the core code are
> rarely needed - most evolution is in the packages themselves.
> 
> Buildroot is maintained by volunteers. There are 4 maintainers, i.e. people
> with commit access. However, the biggest contribution is made by about 100
> other people who add about 1500 changesets each release. Releases are made
> every 3 months (20XX.02, 20XX.05, 20XX.08, 20XX.11). The last month of a
> cycle is a stability phase where only fixes are applied - but new evolutions
> still end up in the 'next' branch. Twice a year there is a developer
> meeting, although due to the known circumstances this has not taken place
> since February 2020. The community is mainly on the mailing list
> (lists.buildroot.org) and on IRC (#buildroot on OFTC).
> 
> 
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> https://lists.buildroot.org/mailman/listinfo/buildroot

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