Sunday, August 9, 2009

Buildroot on AVR32NGW100

Getting buildroot going for this new toy was far easier than on gumstix. However, there are still a few steps needed that are different from the recommended steps. So far being on an "unsupported" Ubuntu 8.10 system hasn't given me a lot of grief. Yet.

Useful link: http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/tools_card.asp?tool_id=4401.

Anyhoo, this is what I did do:

download the AVRBuildroot tar file from http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0.tar.tar. Note that the ".tar" extension is repeated, so you can easily get rid of that

Untar to chosen folder:

tar xvjf buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0.tar.tar


this should create a new folder named buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0. I have mine at the following location:
~/avr32ngw100/work/buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0/

Next, create a default configuration for your buildroot

cd buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0/
make atngw100_defconfig
make


Normally, you'd leave at this point and go do your laundry or something that consumes time. However, in my case, the build broke because it wasn't able to download docs from the AVR website. Since I'm now a buildroot *cough* expert, i simply set that option to be false.

edit buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0/.config and change

BR2_PACKAGE_AVR32_WIKI_DOCS=y

to

# BR2_PACKAGE_AVR32_WIKI_DOCS is not set



then do

make

and you have your very first buildroot image for avr32!

Once you have good build, all packages would have been downloaded in the dl folder. We should "cache" this so that these same packages needn't be downloaded everytime a clean build is kicked off.


cd ~/avr32ngw100/work/buildroot-avr32-v2.3.0
mv dl ../dl_cache
ln -s ~/avr32ngw100/work/dl_cache dl


now ls -la dl should show you something like:

ls -la dl
lrwxrwxrwx 1 hypo hypo 38 2009-08-09 18:05 dl -> ~/avr32ngw100/work/dl_cache/


Next up, getting the image on the device using tftp and nfsbooting. Since avr32ngw100 also uses U-BOOT, this should be similar to the setup needed for gumstix!


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