Yann E. MORIN
fbd244c277
When the user specifies a number of blocks (and we do not auto-compute them), the generated filesystem can be quite large with large zones with only zeroes in them. Thus, always create the filesystem as a sparse file. Sparse files behave the same as normal files, except those long runs of zeroes do not actually use space on the (host) filesystem. Also, this should not break current behaviour, as neither cp nor dd nor cat preserve sparseness by default. So users relying on the zeroed parts to actually be written won;t see a change. Users that were expressly using cp or dd to copy files to a sparse destination will however see a little bit of improvements, as the zeroed out parts won't even be read from disk. Signed-off-by: "Yann E. MORIN" <yann.morin.1998@free.fr> Cc: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com> Reviewed-by: Samuel Martin <s.martin49@gmail.com> Tested-by: Karoly Kasza <kaszak@gmail.com> Reviewed-by: Karoly Kasza <kaszak@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>
To build and use the buildroot stuff, do the following:
1) run 'make menuconfig'
2) select the packages you wish to compile
3) run 'make'
4) wait while it compiles
5) Use your shiny new root filesystem. Depending on which sort of
root filesystem you selected, you may want to loop mount it,
chroot into it, nfs mount it on your target device, burn it
to flash, or whatever is appropriate for your target system.
You do not need to be root to build or run buildroot. Have fun!
Offline build:
==============
In order to do an offline-build (not connected to the net), fetch all
selected source by issuing a
$ make source
before you disconnect.
If your build-host is never connected, then you have to copy buildroot
and your toplevel .config to a machine that has an internet-connection
and issue "make source" there, then copy the content of your dl/ dir to
the build-host.
Building out-of-tree:
=====================
Buildroot supports building out of tree with a syntax similar
to the Linux kernel. To use it, add O=<directory> to the
make command line, E.G.:
$ make O=/tmp/build
And all the output files (including .config) will be located under /tmp/build.
More finegrained configuration:
===============================
You can specify a config-file for uClibc:
$ make UCLIBC_CONFIG_FILE=/my/uClibc.config
And you can specify a config-file for busybox:
$ make BUSYBOX_CONFIG_FILE=/my/busybox.config
To use a non-standard host-compiler (if you do not have 'gcc'),
make sure that the compiler is in your PATH and that the library paths are
setup properly, if your compiler is built dynamically:
$ make HOSTCC=gcc-4.3.orig HOSTCXX=gcc-4.3-mine
Depending on your configuration, there are some targets you can use to
use menuconfig of certain packages. This includes:
$ make HOSTCC=gcc-4.3 linux-menuconfig
$ make HOSTCC=gcc-4.3 uclibc-menuconfig
$ make HOSTCC=gcc-4.3 busybox-menuconfig
Please feed suggestions, bug reports, insults, and bribes back to the
buildroot mailing list: buildroot@buildroot.org