Preferred build system

For Developers
1

Want to setup a build system. Scouring and reading through the various documentation, it seems that there is no preferred (as in best practice) setup.

These guides seem generalized, with no specific version requirements for packages and what distro to use. The " Beginners guide to building your own firmware" mentioned Debian 9.3, but now we have Debian 10 as well as the older 9.7 and 9.5 VMs available for download from osboxes.org

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/build-system/install-buildsystem

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/additional-software/beginners-build-guide

This page has a "Table of known prerequisites" but no versions are mentioned:

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/build-system/install-buildsystem

I have plenty of processing power and RAM to set up a VM or a few if required. Can anyone point me in the right direction so as to get a standard build system in place?

Would be greatly appreciated.

2

The guide was probably written when 9.3 was current, and the OpenWrt buildroot targets backward compatibility (a wide range of GCC suites e.g.).

So yeah, Debian 10 is an excellent choice to run your builds on.

1 Like
3

Great, so as long as all the prerequisites are installed, I should be good to go. I'm curious if this page lists all the required prerequisites

https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-developer/build-system/install-buildsystem

Are there any additional packages that are needed?

4

It looks pretty complete, if you bump into any missing packages (the buildroot will tell you), then please do report it.

5

I do all my builds of openwrt 18.x/19.x on ubuntu 16 or ubuntu 18 LTS.
And I use ubuntu 14 to build Chaos Calmer.

6

FWIW, the buildbots run Debian, last I knew.

Any widely available, up-to-date desktop/server distro should work.

3 Likes
7

If you want to track upstream closer than Debian, Alpine works great.

1 Like
8

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Went ahead and loaded Debian 10 minimal install, got all the prerequisite packages and am doing a test build right now.

Running this on a VirtualBox VM, 8GB RAM, 4 vCPUs. It's been just over 1.5 hours so far, still compiling.

9

For info, I compile on Debian 9, works fine... as long as your distro isn't stoneage it should work.
I've also compiled openwrt on gentoo without problems.

10

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