Buildroot

Setting up a Buildroot environment for the BL808 SoC is a practical starting point for developing custom Linux firmware and applications. This guide covers the required tools, the repository layout, the default configuration, and the resulting output artifacts.

Overview

Install the required host tools.
Download Buildroot and the buildroot_bouffalo overlay.
Export the overlay path so Buildroot can find the board support.
Load the default configuration for the Pine64 Ox64 board.
Optionally adjust the configuration with make menuconfig.
Build the images.
Collect the output artifacts from output/images/.

Requirements

Install the following tools before building.

Source tools

git

Build tools

which
sed
make version 3.81 or newer
binutils
build-essential on Debian-based systems
diffutils
gcc version 4.8 or newer
g++ version 4.8 or newer
bash
patch
gzip
bzip2
perl version 5.8.7 or newer
tar
cpio
unzip
rsync
file, available as /usr/bin/file
bc
findutils
wget

Config tools

ncurses5, sometimes packaged as ncurses, ncurses-dev, or similar

Get Buildroot and set up the overlay

Download the sources:

mkdir buildroot_bouffalo && cd buildroot_bouffalo
git clone https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot
git clone https://github.com/openbouffalo/buildroot_bouffalo

Export the overlay path so Buildroot can find buildroot_bouffalo:

export BR_BOUFFALO_OVERLAY_PATH=$(pwd)/buildroot_bouffalo

Change into the Buildroot directory:

cd buildroot

Load the default configuration

This loads the Pine64 Ox64 board configuration into the default .config file:

make BR2_EXTERNAL=$BR_BOUFFALO_OVERLAY_PATH pine64_ox64_defconfig

Optional configuration

You can skip directly to the build step, or customize the Buildroot environment with:

make menuconfig

Build

Build the full environment with:

make

This can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on your machine and network connection. One notable download is the Xuantie compiler, which is roughly 500 MB.

By default, Buildroot does not support top-level parallel builds, so running make -jN is not required. Individual build steps that support parallelism will use available CPU cores on their own.

Output

After a successful build, the generated files are placed in buildroot_bouffalo/buildroot/output/images.

cd output/images/
ls -l

Example output:

total 210116
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   13154816 Apr 25 21:33 Image
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    7340032 Apr 25 21:35 bl808-firmware.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root       4012 Apr 25 21:33 bl808-pine64-ox64.dtb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root       4106 Apr 25 21:33 bl808-sipeed-m1s.dtb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root        350 Apr 25 21:35 boot-m1s.scr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root        352 Apr 25 21:35 boot-pine64.scr
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        352 Apr 25 21:35 boot.scr
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  209715200 Apr 25 21:35 boot.vfat
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      31360 Apr 25 21:35 d0_lowload_bl808_d0.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root       4352 Apr 25 21:35 efusedata.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        256 Apr 25 21:35 efusedata_mask.bin
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root        256 Apr 25 21:35 efusedata_raw.bin
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root       4096 Apr 25 21:35 extlinux
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     109864 Apr 25 21:32 fw_jump.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    1200416 Apr 25 21:32 fw_jump.elf
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root      65760 Apr 25 21:35 m0_lowload_bl808_m0.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  536870912 Apr 25 21:35 rootfs.ext2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root         11 Apr 25 21:35 rootfs.ext4 -> rootfs.ext2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   50247680 Apr 25 21:35 rootfs.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1820364800 Apr 25 21:35 sdcard.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     519746 Apr 25 21:32 u-boot.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     315597 Apr 25 21:32 u-boot.bin.lz4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root      14314 Apr 25 21:32 u-boot.dtb

The main files of interest are:

bl808-firmware.bin
d0_lowload_bl808_d0.bin
m0_lowload_bl808_m0.bin
sdcard.img

The remaining files are intermediate artifacts or helper images.

Next steps

Full example on Arch Linux

These commands were run in order on a fresh Arch install:

cd ~
mkdir buildroot_bouffalo && cd buildroot_bouffalo
pacman -Syu git which sed make binutils diffutils gcc bash patch gzip bzip2 perl tar cpio unzip rsync file bc findutils wget ncurses
git clone https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot
git clone https://github.com/openbouffalo/buildroot_bouffalo
export BR_BOUFFALO_OVERLAY_PATH=$(pwd)/buildroot_bouffalo
cd buildroot
make BR2_EXTERNAL=$BR_BOUFFALO_OVERLAY_PATH pine64_ox64_defconfig
make menuconfig
make
cd output/images/
ls

Full example on Debian

These commands were run in order on a fresh Debian install:

cd ~
mkdir buildroot_bouffalo && cd buildroot_bouffalo
sudo apt update
sudo apt install git sed make binutils diffutils gcc g++ bash patch gzip bzip2 perl tar cpio unzip rsync file bc findutils wget libncurses-dev libssl-dev
git clone https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot
git clone https://github.com/openbouffalo/buildroot_bouffalo
export BR_BOUFFALO_OVERLAY_PATH=$(pwd)/buildroot_bouffalo
cd buildroot
make BR2_EXTERNAL=$BR_BOUFFALO_OVERLAY_PATH pine64_ox64_defconfig
make menuconfig
make
cd output/images/
ls