Chapter 6. Selecting a Build System
The preceding chapters covered the four elements of embedded Linux and showed you, step-by-step, how to build a toolchain, a bootloader, a kernel, and a root filesystem, and then combine them into a basic embedded Linux system. And there are a lot of steps! Now it is time to look at ways to simplify the process by automating it as much as possible. I will look at how embedded build systems can help, and look at two in particular: Buildroot and the Yocto Project. Both are complex and flexible tools which would require an entire book to adequately describe how they work. In this chapter, I only want to show you the general ideas behind build systems. I will show you how to build a simple device image to get an overall feel of the system and then how to make some useful changes, using the Nova board example from the previous chapters.
